Good and Bad

[jimbo555]

Criminals will get guns no matter what laws you pass. Only the law abiding follow the law.

 

[DT Guy]

I disagree with everything you've said.

When 'compromise' starts to mean 'give us background checks, and we'll reopen the NFA', I'll consider compromise.

As far as the founding fathers not foreseeing changes in weaponry, I disagree; they were certainly aware weapons HAD changed in the past, and therefore could foresee that they WOULD change in the future.

Truthfully, I consider 'gun owners' such as yourself somewhat despicable; your premise essentially is, "We should make it harder to get guns as long as I can get the ones I want." Folks who turn on their fellows in a struggle ignore either getting ignored, or worse.

 

[Mike J]

shootingthebreeze- Go to www.guncite.com & do some reading. Educate yourself about this matter. Digest all information you can get about RKBA from legitimate sources (not the kellerman study as it is bs) & then come back & discuss this with us. There is a literal ton of information out there if you will go to the trouble to educate yourself beyond emotion & opinion.

 

[Yo Mama]

However, times have changed since the Founding Fathers laid the foundations to the US Constitution. For one, they could not envision the changes in our society and the evolution of firearms that we have today. Nor could they envision the complex issues of mental health and random shootings we are experiencing today including gang violence.

No, they never had any violent acts back then did they? And mental illness??? It's pretty well documented that the history of mental illness is as long as human kind has been on the planet.

Thinking you live in a special or unique time is false.

Listen to the posts here, it's why you're interacting on the forum. Instead you have consistently just said you're for gun control, but not willing to have a debate.

 

[Pizzapinochle]

Criminals will get guns no matter what laws you pass. Only the law abiding follow the law.

If following the law now actually meant not selling guns to criminals, you would have a point. But in many states, you can follow the law and still sell guns to criminals.

Make it a law that it is 100% illegal to sell a gun to someone with a felony conviction in all circumstances and criminals will have fewer sources of guns because, as you said, the law abiding follow the law.

The current system relies on criminals to follow the law (something they don't do, by their nature). I want a system that does not rely on criminal's sense of honor to keep them from buying a gun.

 

[rdhood]

“But our world today is much different than the one when the US Constitution was hammered out.”

What makes you think that? There have always been thugs. There have ALWAYS been groups of men who would band together in order to rape, rob, murder. From prehistoric times, to the bandits of the middle ages, to the streets of Chicago in the 1930s to the streets of Chicago in the 2014s. There has always been a need to protect oneself against criminal forces. With respect to the INDIVIDUAL facing these criminal forces, what has changed? Hint: NOTHING. They need the access to self defense today as much as ever. And YOU, OP, are the one proposing to take that right away. And if that is not what you are proposing, tell us exactly what you WILL accept for a 110lb woman in a questionable urban environment? Hiding in fear is not an acceptable answer.

 

[Mike J]

Pizzapinochle-It is already against the law to sell a gun to a convicted felon. It has been ever since GCA of 1968. That does not stop anything. Firearms are stolen & then transferred between criminals. There are ways of getting things whether it is legal or not, always have been-always will be. The level of ignorance & naivete being displayed by some posters in this thread is frightening.

 

[holdencm9]

"The founding fathers couldn't have imagined more advanced weaponry"...this is one that bothers me so much. Primarily because it doesn't matter; as others have pointed out, they couldn't have imagined the internet (as in, REALLY couldn't have imagined it!) but the 1st Amendment still applies to blogs. But the secondary reason is because weapons that were more advanced than "your typical musket" already existed! Just take a look at the volley gun.

As Sam also noted, the founding fathers were all brilliant students of history, and also visionaries. My guess is they could have seen something like the volley gun and imagined similar multi-shot weapons in a shoulder-fired platform. It's not that great a leap.

As for UBC...yeah they won't work without registration, which is why most pro-gun people don't support them, but you appear to support registration so it is really pointless to argue about UBC with you. I will just point out that UBC brings up a lot of non-gun issues related to private property and what we are permitting the government to sink their teeth into.

 

[Ryanxia]

Shootingthebreeze - happy you're getting to have this discussion now? There seems to be plenty of folks who will debate with you over the 'Good and Bad' of gun control.
In this setting you can have an exchange of information on your topics and thought processes without taking over other threads.

 

[Pizzapinochle]

Pizzapinochle-It is already against the law to sell a gun to a convicted felon. It has been ever since GCA of 1968.

No, that is wrong. It is illegal to KNOWINGLY sell to a convicted felon.

I can sell to a felon at no risk of being charged with a crime as long as the police/prosecutor can't PROVE that I KNEW they were a convicted felon.

In my state, all I have to check is a DL for residency. They can be a felon of any sort and it is perfectly legal for me to sell to them as long as I don't find out they are a felon before I sell them the gun.

 

[holdencm9]

I can sell to a felon at no risk of being charged with a crime as long as the police/prosecutor can't PROVE that I KNEW they were a convicted felon.

I believe many states add in "or have reason to suspect" or some such thing. So if the buyer even hints that he might be a prohibited person, you could get in trouble.

 

[Pizzapinochle]

So, in my state, steps for a convicted felon to get a gun:

1. Have cash
2. Go on armslist and find any of the 1000s of guns for sale
3. Arrange a meeting via email
4. Don't be a complete blooming idiot at the transaction and say "By the way, I spent 6 years in the pen for armed robbery."

I think not telling someone you are a felon is a pretty easy step to get a handle on.

And good luck finding a cop who will investigate or a prosecutor who will go to trial with "The buyer might have said something that could have hinted at maybe being a prohibited person" as their evidence.

 

[Dain Bramage]

I vote Sam1911 write the state of the union response.

 

[Grassman]

Dang!:banghead::banghead: It's thinking like this that has been slowly chipping away our rights since the 60's. It's gotta stop.

 

[Mike J]

Universal Background checks lead to registration. Registration leads to confiscation. There have been many cases in the last 100 years where confiscation was followed by genocide. Of course I am sure there were many that lived in Germany in the 1930's that thought that couldn't happen there.

 

[rbernie]

So, in my state, steps for a convicted felon to get a gun:

1. Have cash
2. Go on armslist and find any of the 1000s of guns for sale
3. Arrange a meeting via email
4. Don't be a complete blooming idiot at the transaction and say "By the way, I spent 6 years in the pen for armed robbery."

I think not telling someone you are a felon is a pretty easy step to get a handle on.

According to the DoJ's crime statistics - how often does this actually occur? After all, if you're gonna try to solve societal issues, you ought to at least quantify the magnitude and impact of the issue so that you can prioritize your actions accordingly.

Here's a couple of hints. According to the DoJ, most folk convicted of federal crimes that involved the use of a firearm were NOT PROHIBITED PERSONS when they obtained the firearm. Moreover, folk that *were* already felons in fact got their guns from acquaintences or via theft moreso than via any other means. The fact is that face to face sales and gun show sales represented a very small percentage of all means of acquiring a gun by a prohibited person.

And as an aside, in the 'let's face reality' section of the discussion, the fact is that most 'prior felon' uses of firearms in the, um, Continued Execution Of Mischief falls into the gang-on-gang category. It's not common nor particlarly successful for most gang members to show up at a private FTF sale or gun show and successfully buy a gun. Interesting, I've seen it tried here in Dallas, and it didn't work out so well for the 'friends of the gang bangers' who tried it.

But back to my point - adding restrictions to solve a problem that statistically isn't a problem doesn't make much 'common sense' after all, and just winds up being another piece of feel-good legislation that does nothing to cure the root causes of gun-related violence. Calling something 'common sense' doesn't actually make it so.

 

[Pizzapinochle]

Universal Background checks lead to registration. Registration leads to confiscation. There have been many cases in the last 100 years where confiscation was followed by genocide. Of course I am sure there were many that lived in Germany in the 1930's that thought that couldn't happen there.

I HATE that argument, acting like general gun control had anything to do with the holocaust.

Gun restrictions for German Citizens were RELAXED under Hitler. German citizens could, and did, own guns. That was never the problem.

The problem was that Hitler convinced the whole country that one minority group (the Jews) were the source of all their problems and if they would just get rid of that minority group, things would be better. Convinced of this, the whole country stripped that one minority group of ALL their rights. Yes, guns were included in that, but it wasn't a general gun control campaign for all of Germany. German citizens had guns and could have resisted the holocaust. They chose not to.

Frankly, I have heard more arguments from pro-gun people that line up with the Nazi/Hitler rhetoric than I have from anti-gun people.

 

[Sam1911]

So, in my state, steps for a convicted felon to get a gun:

Yup. Or steal one, or buy one off the black market. Of course, the black market for guns could be tightly regulated out of existence, just like they did with alcohol and pot.


...Ok, ok, seriously

Truth is, making laws that make it a crime to UN-knowingly sell to a prohibited person pretty much kills the private sales market for firearms. You either have to accept that any transaction could put you behind bars, or you have to run every buyer through the state system to prove their uprighteousness. It's an ugly thing, and an end run around the problem of making every transaction part of the federal process, trackable and traceable.

 

[hso]

For one, they could not envision the changes in our society and the evolution of firearms that we have today. Nor could they envision the complex issues of mental health and random shootings we are experiencing today including gang violence.

The oft repeated, but logically inconsistent and categorically inaccurate, idea that the well educated products of the Enlightenment and Intellectual Revolution, lively philosophical and political thought discussions, many of which were as familiar with if not actual innovators of radical advances in technology, and who envisioned and made real a democratic republic in an age of Kings, Emperors, and Potentates were so intellectually limited that they couldn't see past the state of the world at the time of the penning of the Constitution simply doesn't make any sense. They knew the good and evil of men, living in times where "justice" was meted out by the individual, mob, or Tyrant and whole communities and classes lived in poverty and squalor so they had no illusions about human and societies nature. They were familiar with repeating firearms and students of DaVinci and other intellectual innovators. They were all too familiar with mass murder as families and communities were killed over an argument or in the name of a cause (or have we forgotten histories recounting villages and town people in America slaughtered or congregations herded into their places of worship to be burned?).

You can not use the "in olden days" argument and be taken seriously.

Almost as bad as the refusal of people on both sides of this debate to simply look at the statistics instead of individual cases. Over and over again at THR we point to the FBI's Uniform Crime reports and the DATA that proves that we are collectively and individually safer from violent crime now than this generation has ever been. RATES are relevant, not the hyped individual events. Even mass shootings are no greater (and a mass shooting according to the FBI and not the Brady Campaign is mass murder of four or more persons during an event with no cooling-off period between the murders typically occurring in one location where one or more people kill several others) in frequency. Criminologists have pointed out that they're cyclical and that even then represent too small a percentage of deaths in a given year to shift the continually downward trend in the rate of murders and violent crime (as last year failed to do).

If the authors of the Constitution and Amendments were involved with leading this nation for most of the first hundred years they saw even more changes in social, political, and technological developments than at the time of their penning of the Constitution and BOR by the time the 1800s came about. Yet they saw no need to make the changes being advocated by many.

If the rate of violent crime and murder has been dropping since the 1980s and mass shootings don't impact that rate of decline in violence, what are the motives for treating 90% of our citizens as if they were criminals?

If states with liberal laws on firearms ownership imposing few if any restrictions beyond the federal restrictions have low violent crime and murder rates while others with conservative laws restricting firearms ownership have higher rates of violent crime and murder it seems to anyone that understands statistics and has a passing understanding of sociology and criminology that the device isn't the key to pushing the rate of crime low and the far more difficult issues of poverty, education, opportunity, freedom that sociologists and criminologists point to are what needs to be addressed.

 

[Mike J]

Germany is not the only place this has happened.

To be honest though I personally believe GCA of 1968 should be repealed as I believe it is just a means to stripping people of their citizenship rights. I know plenty of people who are convicted felons that have been out of trouble & leading productive lives for 20 years. I have known people that were never convicted of anything that I would not consider trustworthy.
If someone has paid there debt to society & is trusted enough to be turned loose they should have their rights. If they can not be trusted to function in society we need to either keep them locked down or eliminate them not turn them loose.

 

[Pizzapinochle]

According to the DoJ's crime statistics - how often does this actually occur? After all, if you're gonna try to solve societal issues, you ought to at least quantify the magnitude and impact of the issue so that you can prioritize your actions accordingly.

DOJ does not track firearms sales. Thanks to pro-gun efforts, very little meaningful research has ever been done tracking the pipeline of guns to criminals. The NRA has done a pretty good job of making sure no one knows for sure how guns get to criminals.

Here's a couple of hints. According to the DoJ, most folk convicted of federal crimes that involved the use of a firearm were NOT PROHIBITED PERSONS when they obtained the firearm.

Would like to see a link to that finding, I’ll wait to respond until I know exactly what you are saying.

Moreover, folk that *were* already felons in fact got their guns from acquaintences or via theft moreso than via any other means. The fact is that face to face sales and gun show sales represented a very small percentage of all means of acquiring a gun by a prohibited person.

Acquaintances: So, the criminal (named Sam) who gets caught with the gun got the gun from his buddy (named Bob). Where do you think Bob got the gun? You think Bob would be less likely to give Sam the gun if Bob knew that HE would go to jail if Sam got caught with it?

And as an aside, in the 'let's face reality' section of the discussion, the fact is that most 'prior felon' uses of firearms in the, um, 'continued execution of mischief' falls into the gang-on-gang category.

Lets see a citation for that too. Hint: Most homicides are NOT gang related. They are connected to “arguments,” usually over money or sex. Not sure about general crimes, but I would bet that most household robberies or armed robberies of gas stations or random people are not gang related.

 

[Ranger Roberts]

I disagree with almost everything that the OP said. The part I am most hung up on is the "sane" gun control laws. Who determines what is sane? If 50% of our citizens are against something and 50% are for something, does that mean that every other person I talk to is insane? I used to jump out of airplanes for a living and willingly re-upped for another tour, knowing that I was going to have to go back to an active war zone. Is that the behavior of a "sane" individual? Some people would say I was being patriotic but the truth is, I loved what I did. Is that "insane" to some? I bet they would say it is. Does that mean I should lose my gun rights?

As far as selling to a felon goes, I believe it is a slippery slope. For example, John Smith becomes a felon for a crime that hurts nobody (white collar type of crime). Now he can no longer own firearms or vote? If he was such an extreme danger to our citizens, shouldn't he still be incarcerated? People would say that our prison system is setup to punish, not to reform. Ok, I agree. Shouldn't we start spending some of our money changing the system (both prison and mental health) to reform offenders rather than sending BHO to Hawaii every other week to play basketball with his friends? Maybe the time and energy that our elected officials spend trying to pass bull crap gun laws (aka trolling for votes to win another election) can be used on prison reform, healthcare or balancing the budget.

I can go on and on but I won't because it will start to go down that political rabbit hole and it isn't appropriate for this forum.

We have already compromised too much. Time for them to start compromising. Feel free to send a message over to the "other side", I would like to start by talking about suppressors.

 

[Sam1911]

Where do you think Bob got the gun? You think Bob would be less likely to give Sam the gun if Bob knew that HE would go to jail if Sam got caught with it?

Where? Well, he probably stole it, or got it from someone else who did.

Or he's one of the many "not yet incarcerated" gang members and friends who already buy guns in straw purchases for their felonious pals -- KNOWING or having REASON TO KNOW that the person they're giving the gun to has a record.

See, they're doing it NOW, even though it's already illegal. Making it more illegal-er isn't going to improve the situation, and will hurt good folks in very real ways.

 

[shootingthebreeze]

Thank you...

...for the most part being civil in responding to an explosive topic. Ryanxia my apologies for opening my comments on you NH thread-

Quite a lot of responses all I expected in the negative vein. I had stated that I'm neither a legislator or a lawyer because I don't have that type of experience and training in those fields, especially with firearm control efforts.

Contrary to what many probably think is that I support the Second Amendment. My concern, the chief concern of my thread is the introduction of many bills at state level which is increasing as I said almost weekly. I do agree that many die-I.E the Michigan firearm bill is stagnant at this time and is not going anywhere fast.

But the battering rams are continuing. My concern is that victories in CA, NY, and IL (and there are laws there I DON'T agree with) will encourage more bills introduced at state level at a rate never seen before, most of them bad, some might have merit (like the NH bill proposal).

Flexibility, to me is being able to meet the opposition partly instead of being inflexible. I read the NH bill and that is one step sealing off a loop hole with private firearm sales. Granted, criminals will always get weapons on the black market. I know that I'm not naïve.

Again thank you for your comments. I myself can't wait till it gets nicer so I can go to Rose Lake shooting range and practice again it's freezing here in MI.

 

[rbernie]

DOJ does not track firearms sales. Thanks to pro-gun efforts, very little meaningful research has ever been done tracking the pipeline of guns to criminals.

Actually, the DoJ studies conducted over the last handful of decades have done the unthinkable - THEY ASKED THE CRIMINALS. We, as a society, actually have a pretty dang good understanding of how firearms wind up being used in the commission of violent crimes.

The NRA has done a pretty good job of making sure no one knows for sure how guns get to criminals.

I'd like some proof for this, other than the usual 'the NRA won't support anything that allows LEOs to track gun purchases, so they're keeping LE from doing their job!'.

Would like to see a link to that finding, I’ll wait to respond until I know exactly what you are saying.

Dude - if you're gonna talk about something, please invest the time to research it. The basic research starts here: http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=tp&tid=43, with the Firearms Violence Summary report being the likely first stop.

The Crime Victimization report is an interesting window into the types of crimes most commonly committed, to provide an additional dimension to the debate: http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cv09.pdf

Hint: Most homicides are NOT gang related. They are connected to “arguments,” usually over money or sex. Not sure about general crimes, but I would bet that most household robberies or armed robberies of gas stations or random people are not gang related.

Actually, you're making my point. Most (as in more than half) violent crime that involves the use of a firearm is in fact the result of arguments over gang-related activies or arguments between criminal actors engaged in criminalized activities such as trafficing in sex and/or drugs. The inability for a victim of violent crime involving a firearm to ID their assailant as a gang member makes the survey question 'was The Bad Guy recognizably a gang member' a bit harder to answer directly, but still the FBI Supplemental Homocide Report in 2003 said that 10% of all homocides were committed by a known gang mamber.

http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/vgm03.pdf

I suggest reading the Firearm Violence summary report from BJS and then doing some subsequent detailed research on the topic: http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/fv9311.pdf I also highly recommend that, when you bring statistics or data points to the table, they be mature enough to show within them their collection and analysis methodology and the margins of error. Once nice thing about the BJS data is that it's 'professional', in that it contains references to the surveys used to collect the data as well as complete discussions about how the data was assembled and manipulated. Many folk claining to 'show data' don't bring that degree of rigor, and as a result the findings are highly suspect.

Debate is a good thing. Entering a debate without the benefit of fact is not. Demanding that others prove you wrong without being willing to prove your own point is the hallmark of the intellectually immature.

ETA:

An interesting side read is the Weapons Use By Offense Type report: http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=tp&tid=43 I find it interesting to note that the majority of reported violent crimes in the US in 2009 did not involve the use of any visible weapon at all, much less a firearm.