The Great ILX Gun Control Debate

Is there anyone on this thread who has admitted to being a gun owner and can answer that? I've been reading this thread/thinking about it silently but can ask my father if there isn't anyone else here with personal experience. I'm actually sorta curious now as to what process he had to undergo to get the several guns/rifles that were (still are) kept in our house while I was a kid.

milo z

Ha - obv didn't read whole thread. Then Milo should chime in here. I'd be interested in finding out more about GBX's question re the procedures and paperwork or lack thereof.

isn't gbx a gun person

Depends on the state. I've only bought guns in Texas, which is relatively lax:

As far as federal requirements go, you fill out a form 4473 that asks you for all your infomation, has a series of check boxes where you answer that you are a citizen, you aren't a felon, you aren't under a restraining order, you haven't renounced your citizenship, etc. - all pretty pointless, but I assume they exist to add punishment should someone get busted for a straw purchase or w/e.

If you live in a state where your concealed handgun license requires a thorough background check, the dealer fills out their part of the 4473 and you're on your way.
If you don't have a CHL or your state's requirements don't include a check, the dealer calls you into the NICS system to determine whether or not you can buy a gun. This takes several minutes and requires more paperwork by the FFL. I'm lucky, as I had a form of federal firearms license for a few years (I could have 'curio and relic' guns shipped directly to me), my approval never takes any time at all. The background check will either immediately approve you, deny you or put a hold on your purchase while they try to figure out if you can't buy the gun or if you're just getting confused with someone who can't. After 72 hours they have to formally deny or you can go ahead and buy the gun.

4473s are kept by the firearms licensee for a time, but there's not supposed to be any actual federal record keeping regarding who has purchased what or who's called into NICS.

In terms of personal transactions, as long as I believe I'm selling a gun to someone of legal age and not a felon, I can do so privately (so long as I'm not doing it as a dealer).

Other states are more strict - person to person transfers need to go through a FFL (I think California does this), you need a permit to get a handgun, period (NY), etc.

isn't gbx a gun person

― conrad, Monday, January 10, 2011 10:55 AM (44 minutes ago) Bookmark

nope. i grew up with them, know how to shoot them, but i don't own any and never have. never been hunting, either, which was probably not made clear upthread.

also:

In terms of personal transactions, as long as I believe I'm selling a gun to someone of legal age and not a felon, I can do so privately (so long as I'm not doing it as a dealer).

this right here seems to be the gaping loophole. legal age is verifiable enough (check a driver's license or something), but the average person cannot verify whether or not someone is a felon, or at least not easily, as far as i can tell. and while the legal ramifications of selling to a felon might dissuade some ppl from doing it, i'd wager that unless you ~knowingly~ sold to a felon, it might be difficult to actually go to jail for it. maybe not, though. also, if a gun changed hands several times, privately, before ending up in the hands of a felon who used it for a murder, it sounds like the only way to trace the weapon is to its original, legal, point of sale. and i can't imagine how law enforcement would be able to trace the natural history of a handgun that was purchased in like ID and used in a murder in FL, possibly many years later.

4473s are kept by the firearms licensee for a time, but there's not supposed to be any actual federal record keeping regarding who has purchased what or who's called into NICS.

sooo...is the 4473 associated with the individual weapon, or with the gun owner? i'm guessing the "federal record keeping regarding who has purchased what" is the biggest stumbling block here, politically and maybe legally. our well-regulated militias almost certainly believe that a federal database of who the gun owners are, and what they've got in their safes, totally sells out the idea of civilian resistance to tyranny, and could no doubt be used for nefarious govt strong-arming (hmm...looks like a bunch of black dudes are registered gun owners, let's keep an eye on them!). buuuuut....we track explosives and who buys them, right? i guess i'm sympathetic to the idea that a govt that has the ability to spot aggregations of armed resistance just by checking a database might be Big Brotherish and preemptively suppressive of the revolution we won't be having any time soon, but revolutions are illegal anyway so who fucking cares

Yet you can sell your car privately and someone will still be responsible (in CA at least) for making sure the State knows that the title has changed. At the risk of sounding like a traditional liberal, the idea of liability and mandatory insurance seems more and more attractive. Yes, you have a right to have a gun but not irresponsibly and your right is tempered by duties.

also, and again this seems big brotherish and a little grating to my 15yo self's libertarian gun-shooting sensibilities, it seems like a federal database (or at least robust state-databases that the fed was allowed to hook into or w/e) would greatly ease investigative law enforcement.

like i don't care if a bunch of skinheads live in the woods with massive stockpiles of legally obtained guns. nor do i care if black panthers assert their 2nd amendment rights and start a gun club in s chicago. this contravenes how i feel about most privacy issues, but i'm kinda willing to say that if you want yr gun to be a secret gun, then its v v likely that anything you plan on using it for will be 'antisocial' to say the least

also wouldn't 'knowing where all the legally purchased handguns are' seem to satisfy the 'well-regulated militia' thing? like yup these ppl have guns and could be minutemen if needed, here they are!

arguing against the documentation of gun ownership might be offensive to 'american values' (lol), but i can't see how it's offensive to the constitution? i mean if yr argument of last resort against tightly-regulated-but-still-legal gun ownership (including assault rifles, heck why not) is that the govt knowing about yr guns ~defeats the purpose~ then a) you don't seem to understand how armed uprisings really work and b) might actually be a person for whom a gun isn't the best idea. the only way the govt will ever be cowed by an armed citizenry is if we can start buying tanks and fighter jets at wal-mart

~bloggin~

I'm on my phone so hard to read and respond to all the long posts.

But re: the gun show loophole, your average gun owner would not be up in arms over that any more than the background check.

But just because it's a loophole doesn't mean there's any real harm from it either. A criminal seeking to obtain a gun doesn't care about the legality of registration or private transfer. It certainly hasn't stopped anything in Cali. And because of the number of guns in the US and lack of record keeping/private sales/etc. the idea of forming a master list now is kind of pointless.

I'm pretty laissez-faire about guns because they aren't a big issue to me. There are greater risks to public health and safety than the existence of guns, there are greater risks to liberty than taking them away, there are far greater causes of violent crime than the existence of guns. The right and the left both wildly overreact to guns as an issue.

totally with you on the last graf, fwiw.

and while it might be sort of pointless to have a master list of guns/owners in the US (though man i'd stay away from saying Master List in a political environment), it also wouldn't hurt? and might not be political kryptonite to anyone that tried to get it to happen? maybe? vs. like an outright ban on guns or even just handguns. i dunno, it seems like tighter handgun regs/closing the loophole might strike the best balance between political expediency/actual public good than a lot of other alternatives, and might merit pursuit.

i'd ~rather~ we went after root causes instead, but i don't think it'd be a waste of time or effort to make some changes, even if the damage has already been done (fat chance keeping tabs on the guns that are already out there, but why not track from now on). we may not know what happened to the soviets nukes, but it doesn't mean it's a waste of time to monitor the ones we DO know about. overblown analogy, probs, but w/e

going after the root causes is as difficult as criminalizing gun ownership - any euro-esque social welfare program will get as much political/institutional opposition as a serious gun control program. legalizing drugs? lol.

yeah :-/

though i guess i labor under the impression that since gun control is such a wildly incendiary topic, even something like legalizing drugs would generate what would appear to be sane and sober discussion by comparison

in some places it does! those same places would probably have essentially banned guns in 2010.

were it not for the 2nd

also, and again this seems big brotherish and a little grating to my 15yo self's libertarian gun-shooting sensibilities, it seems like a federal database (or at least robust state-databases that the fed was allowed to hook into or w/e) would greatly ease investigative law enforcement.

as I continue to learn, with a lot of pain and frustration and headaches, this kind of thing is ridiculously hard to build even if everybody ostensibly wants to play nice and help out. legislating it into existence would just make it 2x as impossible because you'd have literally every contractor in the entire world put in a bid, and the companies that didn't win would probably sue the government, which would be settled by scrapping the entire deal and starting over. this process would probably be repeated 2x. I am not making any of this up.

2x!!

!!

hm, so perhaps we should just ban them

thats quite the suggestion

lol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rj47lB1a-0Y

sb guns

I thought about creating a sock account called 'guns' and inviting everybody to symbolically SB it

okay I'm heading over to the your terrible ideas thread, see you all there

http://www.cnn.com/2011/CRIME/01/18/south.carolina.family.shot/index.html?hpt=T2

ugh

What that kid needed was obv. more safety training. Plus, if his family was armed maybe it wouldn't have happened.

Couldn't have happened if we banned handguns, right?

They should ban children.

Couldn't have happened if we banned handguns, right?

― boots get knocked from here to czechoslovakier (milo z), Tuesday, January 18, 2011 5:56 PM (1 hour ago)

salient point

well, those poor people are dead, but at least old men can still hunt small birds

world without guns

http://t0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:OmM8cmOm_-ebUM:http://1funny.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/birds-attack.jpg&t=1

some interesting statistics from the mcleans article i posted on the arizona-shootings thread:

Since 1776, a total of 580,000 U.S. troops have been killed in action, including the carnage of the Civil War. In just four decades ending in 2008, the number of firearms deaths in the U.S. was 1.3 million.

According to the most recent annual data, in 2007 31,224 people died in the U.S. of gunshot wounds—12,632 of them murdered (other causes of death included suicide and unintentional deaths). A further 66,768 people survived gun injuries—44,466 of them sustained in an attack. Over the past three decades, on average about 20 mass shootings—defined as having at least four slain victims—have occurred annually in the United States, claiming nearly 100 lives each year. Some have been worse than others. March 2005: seven people dead in the Red Lake, Minn., massacre. April 2007: 32 killed in the Virginia Tech massacre. March 2009: 10 people killed in the Geneva County massacre in Alabama. April 2009: Binghamton, New York, 14 dead.

The U.S. has an estimated 283 million guns in civilian hands: approximately one-quarter of American adults own a licensed gun.

xxxxp I don't think anyone thinks gun control = no guns.

well not in my lifetime but it's the goal

ain't gonna happen

They should ban children.

― Josh in Chicago, Tuesday, 18 January 2011 22:56 (Yesterday)

not with liberals constantly reminding me of that, yeah i know xp

xp sort of otm - anyone who thinks a child should be allowed anywhere near a gun is obv insane

You're more likely to get children banned than guns.

one-gun-per-household policy

I'm not sure why you specified 'liberals telling you that' - is one's political ideology supposed to override reality?

the world changes in pretty crazy ways, maybe 100 years from now guns will just be kind of pointless cause there will be better ways to kill people / hunt birds / protect yourself from government fascism.

alternatively gun people might just get iphones and realize that playing angry birds is more fun than owning a gun

I own Angry Birds on both iPad and iPhone. It has never been, in any way, as fun as taking three 9mm semi-autos to the range today and shooting 250 rounds.

Sex -> laughing with pretty girls = Catan with friends ->shooting guns ->>>>>>>>>>>>>Angry Birds

the world changes in pretty crazy ways, maybe 100 years from now guns will just be kind of pointless cause there will be better ways to kill people / hunt birds / protect yourself from government fascism.

polar ice caps melting should help

so I guess we just need to get gun owners laid?

I have never played angry birds fwiw

if not laid, then a regular game of Catan, yeah