Why more gun control?
The media is all a-buzz about more gun control for some reason. I guess that’s all of those journalism school graduates who want to change the world. Chief Tango sends us a link from Amazon.com’s Washington Post to an article entitled “Most gun owners support restrictions. Why aren’t their voices heard?” which concludes, falsely, that because of some mis-worded poll questions, that gun owners want more gun control;
85 percent of gun owners favor universal background checks, an idea fiercely opposed by the gun lobby. Gun owners also strongly support a federal database of gun sales, prohibiting ownership for those convicted of domestic violence and barring people with mental illness from buying guns.
Though there is less support for banning high-powered assault rifles — about 49 percent of gun owners would, vs. 64 percent of non-gun owners, according to Pew — gun control advocates are emboldened that a near majority is out of lockstep with the gun lobby.
The truth is that gun owners favor background checks. Me included. But if you get down in the weeds with your questions, you’d find that gun owners want the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) strengthened. There is no “gun show loop hole” – I’ve bought three guns at gun shows and went through the same background checks that I would have endured at a retailer’s store. There is no “internet loop hole” I’ve bought a bunch of guns in auctions and website sales, and every time the guns shipped to a retailer’s store and I went through the background checks.
The Washington Post wants you to believe that gun owners want a national gun registration process, but someone tell me how national registration prevents crime. Everything beyond background checks is just TSA-style feel good mental masturbation. It makes people feel safer without actually making anyone safer.
When someone in New York State gets shot with a 9-millimeter handgun, do the local authorities question everyone with a registered 9-millimeter for their alibi while the crime was committed? No, never. And that’s the only way that gun registration would influence crime – if criminals were afraid that they’d be caught with their registered gun. Gun registration isn’t a law enforcement tool – it’s just so the government knows where all of the guns are, if and when they decide that we don’t need them anymore. We’re only one Supreme Court Justice away from that decision, by the way.
But criminals don’t register their guns, they don’t buy their guns at a place where they’d be subjected to background checks. That’s why they’re criminals. The only people who buy their guns in accordance with the law, are law-abiding non-criminals. Anyone who says that there is easy-access to guns in this country has never gone through background checks, never bought a legal gun. Even though I had a Top Secret clearance (a spotless record) last year before I retired, there was an extra step I had to go through to buy a gun – one more phone call to the FBI than the rest of you went through. And I’d get the evil eye from the retailer because of it.
Every shooter in the last several “mass shootings” had something in their history that should have triggered a flag on their NICS check, but because the government is more concerned with keeping law-abiding citizens from buying firearms, those who should be flagged, sail right through the process. The ultimate goal of the government is to take guns away from law abiding citizens, because that’s all they can do is write laws to restrict the rights of people who obey the law. There are no laws to prevent criminal behavior, only laws to punish those who get caught.
Category: Gun Grabbing Fascists
Gun registration and confiscation, GEE WHIZ, look at what that did to reduce crime in Mexico!
It didn’t lower crime in New Orleans where law-abiding gun owners had their firearms confiscated based on their gun registration paperwork. People seem to forget about the use of gun registration forms to confiscate guns from people down there after Katrina. But, the criminal gang members were allowed to keep their guns because the cops didn’t know where they were.
Has not lowered crime in Chicago. Go visit the sout’ side in person.
ABSOLUTELY! WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME anyone saw criminals lining up to turn THEIR GUNS in anytime a new Gun Law was passed?
“But criminals don’t register their guns, they don’t buy their guns at a place where they’d be subjected to background checks. That’s why they’re criminals.”
I guess that makes me a criminal. The last gun I bought was through a private sales. I did have to show ID, and sign a bill of sales. But no registration. Just the selling and buying of private property, same as a washer, or a vacuum, or a carpet.
Yeah, I bought a rifle through a private sale last year. That doesn’t make me a criminal. The person who sold it to me knew that I would pass a NICS background check.
Well there we have it. Probably purchased some Assault Rifle while skulking around some back alley.
“Private Sale”, ya, thats code for buying an unregistered GUN. I bet you have a bunker where you hoard cases of ammo for it too.
What to you need that for? Do you have some need to hunker down in a sand bag bunker on the porch breathlessly waiting for an opportunity to blaze down Bambi?
The rifle I bought was considered an “assault rifle” – during World War I – it is an M1903 .30-06 bolt action.
I have two guns here in Virginia and you don’t have to do no registration. Plus I have a CCW permit.
WELL DAYUM, that would make me the proud owner of TWO .58 Caliber “Assault Rifles”! They’re reproductions of the Springfield and Enfield Rifles used during the Civil War and they’re black powder muskets!
That reminds me of the time Piers Morgan got his ass handed to him on Twitter. I don’t know who @caroljstroth is, but I love her like a sumbitch. Hilarious.
http://therightscoop.com/piers-morgan-got-pwned-on-twitter-over-gun-control/
Nice pick-up, Jonn. Sporterized or is it original full stock version?
I’ve got one of those same assault rifles. It was a funeral rifle for an American Legion post for years, and the barrel is pretty pitted, but it will still put three rounds in a half-dollar at 100 yards.
“Why more gun control?” you ask? Because as Rahm said, “Never let a serious crisis go to waste”. Or as other people say “never let a tragedy go to waste”.
Andy, you are right. The liberal press and the Democratic party picked up an opportunity to split gun owners off from the rest of the Republican party. The more fractured the party is, the less that it is able to speak with one voice and elect a president. This is not about guns. This is about a political party trying to stay in control.
Don’t think so?
The Democrats tell me that the entire Republican party thinks that global warming is a crock and they want to kill our children and that the entire Republican party thinks Planned Parenthood is murder and that the entire Republican party thinks anyone in favor of the military being in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria is a warmonger and a murderer and in favor or torture and the entire Republican party opposes universal background check wants to see dead children in our schools and the entire Republican party thinks that LGBT people should be chemically altered or forced to be “normal”. Unless YOU get out and vote, those loonies will take over the country and push us back into the dark ages of 1955. They probably want everyone to start smoking again and bring back thalidomide for morning sickness.
I’m not cynical, I am realistic. This is all a political game to split up the republican party, repel the moderates away from republicans and toward democrats, and keep the democrats in power.
“The Democrats tell me that the entire Republican party thinks that….” I like the list that follows that intro. That’s the R party I WANT and can’t have.
I forgot the one about a wall on our southern border that is so high that no one can ever climb over it and with cameras so the right-wing-wackos can sit at home drinking beer while watching hispanic children dying on the south side. I intentionally skipped the one about starting a war with China over a coral reef that is 6 inches above low tide in the south CHINA sea. And the one about trying to start a war in the Ukraine when Putin can drive from the Kremlin to Kiev in an hour, are those right-wing-wackos stupid? And the one about how Hillary just made a mistake, after all doesn’t everyone have a private email server that the chinese can hack? What’s the difference?
There was a big discussion at that Oregon school where the latest mass shooting took place. That discussion was about whether to arm their only guard.
If this discussion was public, the shooter would have surely known that he was looking at a defenseless pool of people.
Surely there is something wrong with publicizing the creation of a soft target.
And yet liberals do it all the time. Just look at the signs all over places declaring areas to be “Gun-Free Zones”, all happy-happy-joy-joy with unicorns farting rainbows and shitting Skittles®™ while gangbanging Smurfette until some evil BushHitlerCheneyNRANaziAnti0bamaGunfreak comes in and shoots the place up, Yeah, the GUNS make them do it, not like they’d go on knife rampages like in China or Great Britain, or would they? Maybe it ain’t the guns, it’s the nuthatches that would do something evil to gain fifteen minutes’ fame, ya think? And WHAT IF there weren’t “Gun-Free Zones” and strict Gun Control laws promising them a smorgasbord of unarmed VICTIMS?
I still wonder if Bernasty could buy a firearm right now.
He is just the type to go off his nut and start shooting…
Just an observation from years of psych nursing…
Nope. A simple background check would show his assault of the judge, and the basic name search would show his crazy through the California Bar. That’s the only good thing about him is that he can’t legally possess a weapon.
He could always decide to use his aircraft as a weapon in a kamikaze mission. The upside of that is that the only people facing danger would have to be located within a 200 yard radius of the airstrip.
One of the reasons that the Oregon Bar wouldn’t admit him was because he took a handgun to a discovery meeting with the opposition counsel in California.
That and the elevator brawl with a Judge, his destruction of clients’ records,…
Identify the problem and adapt. For all the talking that has been done by armchair quarterbacks, you would think there would be a solution. However, civilian and government civilian MDMP, lacks. While the blow hards continue admiring their sphincters, I say let their be armed 6 year olds (properly trained, of course). Our kids are much more resilient than the mainstream population would like many to believe. If Kids can absorb the BS we feed them in media and at school, they can be properly trained with a sidearm that is suitable. Third period is weapons cleaning. We, as a people, need to stop being afraid of bad people as well as passing the “sand catcher” mentality down to our kids.
Fricking buzzwords to incite panic and fear. What is a “high powered assault rifle”. It certainly sounds scary! I better check my safe, make sure I don’t have any of those things. Wouldn’t want to get assaulted in the middle of the night.
Do you have a pink one of those?
OH NO’s, not the scary PINK rifle!
Before all of my guns fell off of that boat during a fishing trip, I always had a loaded handgun handy. Strange, I could leave it alone ALL BY ITSELF and it NEVER ran off and harmed or killed anyone all by itself, and IT NEVER made ME go on a rampage either!!
Has there ever been a report of any kind of incident with a “low powered rifle”? Just curious if it’s the “high powered” bit that scares the bed wetters or the black rifle thingee or just the thought of someone possessing a weapon.
My pistol safe is unlocked every night that I’m sleeping there, neither of the pistols in that safe have assaulted anyone, or even pointed themselves at someone.
Like my favorite bedtime poem:
Now I lay me down to sleep
Beside my bed a gun I keep
If I awake and you’re inside
The Coroner’s van will be your last ride.
Good one, PI. My favorite is “God & Glock protect this house. Enter uninvited and you will quickly meet both.”
Or,
“You’ll see the flash and never hear the sound.”
Or,
“When rudely awakened while asleep in your bed,
the best resolution is two to the chest & one in the head.”
Nice. Mind if I swipe one of them? 😀
Who has the information and what could be done with it would be a concern of mine. Data consolidation, fusion centers, gun buy backs, ensure all gun owners turned in their weapons and then level three suspected homes. Simple.
Along with that, think of how “safe” our data has been the past 15 years in the federal gummint.
Imagine how easy it would be to pull that information and then “anti-gun” types would have it published in their newspapers, on the internet, etc. Then you have the protestors outside their house, at their job, at their kids’ schools talking about the crazy gun people. Among other things.
Ya mean like when that liberal nuthatch rag in NY published their list of local Gun Owners?
Candidly all this flubdub is why I don’t own any of them gun things.
Toss in the notion that I’m a disabled VN vet and ya don’t have to be paranoid to understand.
KEEP THEM EVIL THINGS AWAY FROM ME.
15 minutes at the gun place for my background check. Some guy was there already over an hour wait for his to come back. I’m a Democrat but this gun laws this and that have to go!! If they want to tighten up something, start with the criminals that don’t do it legally.
What is the definition of a “high powered assault rifle”?
Do the embarrassing realities of race and/or ethnicity factor into this topic, or are they forbidden subjects for discussion?
I know I’m not the only one who sees it.
I finally have a pat answer simple enough for liberals to understand…
Restricting legal gun ownership because criminals and crazies shoot people is like getting a vasectomy because your neighbors have too many kids.
Supposedly Clint Eastwood said that or something like it. Husband’s favorite? “We should outlaw spoons because Americans are fat”
True story- I used that and a liberal came back with a diatribe on the moral imperative of zero population growth, vegan-ism, enviro-something, climate yada yada yada. At least I think that’s what he was saying as I
That and the moonbats that screech gun ownership for protection is redundant because we have Law Enforcement need to be told that then the private ownership and possession of fire extinguishers and sprinkler systems should be outlawed because that’s what Fire Departments are for! I love using that on moonbats, it makes them go apeshit!
problem is, they don’t care about any other point of view than “guns are bad mmkay, take them away from everyone!”
Even a dimwit kicker from the NFL (Kluwe?) tweeted recently:
Chris Kluwe @ChrisWarcraft Oct 9
“The idea that “if we outlaw guns only criminals will have guns” ignores the point that it’s not criminals shooting up schools.”
The horridly stupid second part of that is there are liberals defending his tweet. And even when they said “um, he’s a criminal as soon as he goes there to shoot people” he just blocked them and ignored them. then, sent a bunch more tweets and others tweeted defending his lunacy.
I actually pulled that from his twitter page, I seriously thought it was made up. Its not and he’s defending it.
Has anyone ever publicly asked a news reporter, bureaucrat, elected official, political candidate, and/or pundit, to define and/or describe a “High Powered Assault Rifle”?
If so, I’d like to know what their answer is.
= “yours”
Isn’t this largely dependent upon which state you’re in? I thought I read that something like 18 of the states require private sellers to do background checks, but the other 32 do not.
(I’m aware of the problems of a ‘registry’, have no desire to take everyone’s guns, etc. — I just want to understand this, because this does appear to be a ‘loophole’ in some sense. I fear we argue semantics when we aren’t talking about the same thing. To the point, a background check is not required for private sales in most states?)
This is an area I’m admittedly not terribly knowledgeable about, but that means I’m also fairly unbiased. So, what’s the deal here?
The short answer is that a “private” seller is not in the “formal” business of selling guns, i.e. not a gun shop or gunsmith etc. The federal law does state a certain number of guns one can sell per year before losing his “private” designation. The ATF website has access to the regs that cover this and explain it pretty well.
LC – you might enjoy reading this: http://thefederalist.com/2015/10/05/hillarys-gun-show-loophole-proposal-is-a-joke/
Thanks, both of you – I’d wager it’s perceived as a loophole because, to many, the idea is that every gun purchased is done so with a background check, and this leaves areas where that isn’t the case. In other words, it’s a ‘loophole’ that exists because the idea is different from the legal implementation.
I guess my next questions would be: 1) Do we have any data on how often this law is enforced / ignored? And 2) do we have any data on what percentage of guns relating to homicides were purchased in a way that a stronger law would’ve prohibited? And I’m not saying that this would’ve stopped it, since if someone wants a weapon they’ll get one, but it’d be good to at least understand what the data says.
Thanks,
LC
You’re welcome LC. It may be perceived as a loophole, but the presence of a “gun show’ is not required. By making reference to a “gun show loophole”, I think the hysterical among us are trying to perpetuate a myth that gun shows are places where “anything goes”… substantive evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. I think if any politician had a genuine interest in effecting real substantive change, they would not choose to perpetuate a myth. Therefore, my conclusion is they are idiots grandstanding for the camera and the uninformed vote.
As it is, private sellers can legally sell non Title II firearms that they own to another private individual, without regulation in most states. Perhaps there will be a discussion about altering that, but if so, the words “gun show” are irrelevant to the discussion. Further, if the current practice is altered by regulation, I do not foresee a dramatic benefit in regards to a decline in “mass shootings”. There are current laws on the books that are not enforced… no one in the spotlight asks why.
Guns? What guns? Oh, THOSE guns! Yeah, horrible boat accident last week, lost them all. Sad.
YEAH, me too. POOP HAPPENS!!!
My local gun dealer here in Texas told me that the ATF now requires him to write “Private Sale” at the top of the white sheet if he transfers a weapon for someone. That would be if a customer bought a weapon on the Internet (or somewhere) and it had to be shipped to a dealer, he has the customer fill out the form, he calls it in to the ATF and the customer then pays a transfer fee. The same would be the case if you bought a gun from your neighbor and the neighbor insists that y’all go to a dealer and transfer the ownership via filling out the form and having it called in.
I don’t really see the purpose of this. The ATF does not ask if this was a private sale or not when called in. The form remains in the stores records.
If my neighbor insisted we go to a gun shop for a NICS check, I’d tell him where he could put said gun.
As I have weapons that are used for purely defensive purposes, would they be considered anti-assault weapons?
Is a BB gun or air-soft an
Air Assault Weapon
?
In Minnesota a BB gun is considered a “firearm”. Go figure.
If I fire my rifle at a paper target, it’s not an assault weapon. If I fire it at you, it’s an assault weapon. If I stab you with a pencil, it’s an assault weapon
Just out of curiosity, how could NICS be improved? There are already programs in place that are supposed to strengthen the reporting requirements for it.