Despite anti-gunnite talking points, most law abiding gun owners are not against background checks. We have no problem with making sure that the person attempting to purchase a firearm is not a bad person. But, do background checks actually stop Bad Guys from getting guns? For the most part, no. Hence, the NRA is not suggesting that we do away with the backgrounds check system, they just think it’s absurd to expand it, because it will almost never stop a bad character from getting a gun. And they are against the gun registration schemes of the anti-gunnites, because it is simply a big government control scheme. Furthermore, the government fails to enter those who are “adjudicated mentally incompetent into the National Instant Check System.” But, nothing will ever stop the gun haters from pushing their schemes
Gun Control That Actually Works
FOR more than 80 years, the United States has enforced a tough and effective gun control law that most Americans have never heard of. It’s a 1934 measure called the National Firearms Act, and it stands as a stark rebuke to the most sacred precepts of the gun lobby and provides a model we should build on.
Leaders of the National Rifle Association rarely talk about the firearms act, and that’s probably because it imposes precisely the kinds of practical — and constitutional — limits on gun ownership, such as registration and background checks, that the N.R.A. regularly insists will lead to the demise of the Second Amendment.
In speeches, publications and a steady stream of fund-raising literature, the N.R.A. rails against gun registration and gun owner databases. In 2008, the organization’s chief executive, Wayne LaPierre, claimed that photographing and fingerprinting gun owners was “the key gun control scheme†of the candidate Barack Obama, who, Mr. LaPierre predicted, would confiscate every gun in America before the end of his first term as president. The N.R.A. now says that the “real goal†of “gun control supporters†like Hillary Clinton is “ gun confiscation.â€
But the longstanding National Firearms Act not only already mandated the registration of all owners of machine guns, short-barreled rifles, silencers and other weapons deemed highly dangerous at the time, it created a national database of those gun owners with their mug shots and fingerprints, and a detailed description of each weapon purchased, including its serial number. Purchasers of “N.F.A. weapons,†as they are known, must pass an F.B.I. background check, be approved by the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms and pay a $200 tax. Stolen weapons must be reported to the A.T.F. immediately — the sort of requirement the N.R.A. opposes for other gun thefts.
In other words, the article is about requiring registration, mug shots, and fingerprints, among others, of all guns and their owners. A woman who wants a small .9mm for protection? Take her mugshot and fingerprints, just like she’s a criminal. Yet, these same people who push to treat law abiding gun owners like felons want to turn around and make things easier on actual felons.
Mr. Folloder, a manufacturer and collector of machine guns and silencers, is no fan of the firearms act. He’d like to make machine guns more readily available, and lobbied successfully to repeal a requirement that N.F.A. owners be preapproved by a local law enforcement officer. But Mr. Folloder and the A.T.F. agree that registrants are rarely implicated in crimes. People with registered weapons who can pay $40,000 for a machine gun “bend over backwards to obey the law,†he says. “If you’re going to spend that much money and put that much effort into obtaining one of these, you’re not going to be holding up the liquor store.â€
N.F.A.-classified weapons do show up at crime scenes. But nearly all of them were unregistered, so the simple act of possession was a crime. According to A.T.F. analysis, among N.F.A. weapon owners there were only 12 felony convictions between 2006 and 2014, and those crimes did not involve an N.F.A. weapon. If that conviction rate were applied to the owners of the other privately owned firearms in the United States, gun crime would virtually disappear.
The idea here is to make it so damned expensive and burdensome to own a firearm that only those who can afford them will get them, and it won’t be people who will use them for crime. In essence, only people with money will be able to get them, people who tend to live in fancy pants neighborhoods, which rarely see crime, leaving the lower and middle classes un-armed, easy prey for criminals who do not get their guns legally.
Who will be most in danger? Women. Way to support women being able to defend themselves, Liberals.
The case for licensing and registration is stronger now than ever. Yet to today’s N.R.A. such measures are an existential threat to the Second Amendment. If that is true, why hasn’t the government used the N.F.A. database to confiscate weapons? Why has it failed to move against the holders of hunting licenses and concealed carry permits who readily submit to milder forms of gun licensing and registration?
Because they are a tiny number of weapons. But, let me turn the question around: why is it that anti-gunnites constantly push for schemes that make it harder for law abiding citizens to purchase and carry firearms? Why do they constantly push for more burdensome registration schemes for law abiding citizens? Why do them want things like registration, mug shots, and fingerprints for law abiding citizens? Why are they not pushing for measures against the criminals that use them and obtain them illegally? Why is it that the cities and states with the most burdensome gun schemes, areas run by the Democratic Party, tend to have the high amount of gun play?
I have a compromise: if law abiding gun owners agree to having their fingerprints and mugshots take for gun ownership, how about doing the same for an official voter ID card, which would be necessary to place a vote? Would that be acceptable to the anti-gunnites?
Read: NY Times Is Super Enthused For Massive Gun Registration Schemes »
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