Inside the Federal Bureau of Way Too Many Guns
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I mean, I constantly see the concerns of gun owners derided like this, but I've never seen a good reason why they shouldn't be scared of a national registry. The debate has been purely adversarial for quite some time, so I'm not sure why/how both sides should come together for a good-faith compromise.
As a gun owner, I'm not sure how there can be "compromise" with "universal registration", especially when politicians are actively touting confiscation as an option on the table.
Something I'd liken this to is Obama's "Key Escrow". Apple holds half the key to the encryption, The Feds hold the other. Look, a reasonable compromise! We promise that we won't do anything evil.
You can add California, SKSes due to an AG reinterpretation of the law, New York state, and right now Massachusetts is going through such an event due to their AG.
And as you note, it's not like there's any lack of public figures including politicians who are touting outright confiscation, including those praising the Australian model, which include one of the two major party nominees for this presidential election.
"You aren't paranoid if they are out to get you."
You still might be. Just that thinking they're out to get you isn't, in that case, evidence of it...
It's like your boss asking you to come in and work on Saturday for the good of the team. But won't pay you for your time.
Their lives and safety, on a daily basis?
It's the other way round, really: universal gun ownership involves the sacrifice of thousands of lives annually. Admittedly so does car ownership and OTC tylenol, but in those contexts we can admit the tradeoff and seek to minimise the cost.
Or the difference between citizens, who are traditionally defined as those who bear arms in defense of their polity, with subjects?
I would put it to you that human nature is such that if guns weren't available, people would turn to alternative weapons. Knives. Bats. Fists. The UK is seeing this progression happen now.
But with a tool like a firearm, any 45 kilogram woman can defend herself against a stronger attacker. Or a 77 kg man against someone stronger than him, or perhaps a group of attackers. In the rural USA the attacker doesn't even have to be a person - it could be a brown bear (which are absolutely huge, BTW), a wild boar (increasingly common in the South), or a venomous reptile. Not having a firearm to defend yourself in those situations means you die alone in the wilderness.
But the key thing to all those examples is that they are defensive uses of a firearm. You will seldom see examples of this in the news because it's not lurid enough. And that most of the time, the gun is never even fired - the credible threat is enough to stop the attack.
I'm guessing that you are European, and as such have never seen a defensive use of a gun. You have only been exposed to negative views of them via the news services and Hollywood films. If you visit central Texas anytime, I'd be willing to take you to the range and give you an introduction to safe operation of a firearm and show you that gun owners are regular people too.
> The UK is seeing this progression happen now.
Crime is slowly falling (as it is everywhere) in the UK; there is a bit of a knife problem in some places, but not one that dominates political conversation. Nowhere near as bad as the 50s. Responses range from the ineffective - literally a ban on scary-looking knives ("zombie knives"), to the quite effective Scottish Violence Reduction Unit.
The one thing I accept as a completely legitimate use is against wild animals in the rural USA. No argument there. It doesn't follow from that that everyone needs to have guns in a densely packed city.
Here's how it feels from my point of view: I'd like it if the police could really just run a serial number (perhaps with judicial oversight, warrants, etc.), like they do on T.V.
But the right takes my genuine desire to take some sensible measures to reduce violent crime and turns it into a desire to take away all of the guns and commit some atrocity.
It's like I'm asking you if I could use your cellphone for a second to call for a ride, and you treat me like I'm definitely planning to steal it. Perhaps a sensible measure in some contexts, but it is always a fundamental statement about how little you trust me, and frankly insulting.
Many on the left, of course, do the same thing, although obviously I'm not in as good of a position to describe it.
Somehow we need to restore our trust in one another's shared values. It seems to me that a heavily partisan media has done the most to erode this trust (for example, the vicious attacks on the fundamental values of Bush and Obama), but there might be more too it.
Can you tell us what you are willing to give up to gain any of your goals?
Compromise does not mean only we give up something, but not quite as much as was asked from us at the beginning of the process of drafting a law.
It's an honest question, but I think that part of the problem is that gun rights are at a sort of apogee in this country - I don't really have much more to give.
I don't think it's quite that simple, for it's rather binary. In what I call the free states, it's still climbing, with e.g. 2 states going Constitutional Carry (no license required for concealed carry), with my Missouri likely joining them this month.
In the slave states, its getting steadily worse, California is front and center, but also see the Massachusetts AG continuous redefining of the state's "assault weapons" law, and the various laws that have been passed in the last few years, plus Bloomberg's initiative campaign to ban the lending of firearms, a very direct threat to US gun culture.
And of course there's the minor detail that a very large fraction of the country doesn't see this as a problem at all. The overwhelming majority of the states (42 with shall issue or better), and most of the people (72%, ditto), are directly living and driving this "apogee", through the politicians we freely elect.
As for what we want, let's start with:
Nationwide shall issue concealed carry.
Nationwide reciprocity of concealed carry licenses.
Going further, nationwide Constitutional Carry (no license required, which is the law of the land in 10 states now).
An end to statewide "assault weapons" and magazine capacity bans.
An end to statewide inexpensive gun bans (that's California and Massachusetts.
Cut the thicket of "20,000" gun control laws nationwide to a relative handful, few enough that everyone can know what the law actually is. There's a whole bunch of "flypaper" laws that, whatever the claimed or real intent, just entrap those trying to abide by the law.
Deport Michael Bloomberg ^_^. Seriously, rule unconstitutional the laws he's getting passed, generally by deceptive initiative, that ban the lending of guns, and that are directly aimed at strangulating the creation of new gun owners.
End the VA's polices of removing gun rights from veterans without a real adjudication as is required by law, and stop the extension of this to the elderly on Social Security.
End the ITAR attempt to put most of the nation's gunsmiths out of business.
Put a stake in things like the BATFE's proposal to redefine what nitrogen percentage makes wetted nitrocellulose a high explosive (only stopped for now because of the disaster it posed for the DoD and the rest of the government).
Terminate the BATFE with extreme prejudice, and forbid all in it from ever working in law enforcement again. This article paints a nice picture of them, but in the field they're murderous and incompetent thugs. The ban is to keep them from polluting other law enforcement agencies.
I can go on if you want ^_^.
I'll just let yours stand as evidence of the kind of thing that happens when you ask for compromise on such a strange issue.
If you can't list a single thing, where's the "compromise"?
And please don't take a list and assume I'm demanding all of it in exchange for one of your items, "kitchen sink" may be what I ultimately want, but not in this narrow context (by the same token, the liberals are not shy about calling for total confiscations, so where's the compromise on that side?).
ADDED: And I have no need to replace my comment, since you are not willing to specify anything you're willing to give up. Not. One. Single. Thing.
Maybe we have different definitions of the word compromise?
Well if yours is to ask for measures so extreme that I've never even heard of them, then yes, we do.
You make responsible gun owners look like nuts. But thanks, you've done a wonderful job of illustrating the problem I was commenting on.
And I'm not surprised you haven't heard of the ITAR effort to put most of the nation's gunsmiths out of business, it's very new and still fairly obscure, but are you telling me you see nothing wrong with the general concept of destroying their livelihoods and the work they do for us?
I also gave myself great wiggle room in the "20,000" laws and flypaper bit; are you telling me you can't think of one gun law that makes no sense at all, perhaps one that hasn't worked out in practice? Maybe a relaxation on "the shoulder thing that flips up"?
And, again, ignoring any of the "extreme" items in my wish list, You. Can't. List. A. Single. Thing. to give us in return. If you're asking us to "compromise", but have no idea what you're willing to give up to get what you want, how should we view your offer?
As for your opinion that this makes half the country "look like nuts", "We don't care." We'll just keep piling up the legislative victories in our free states, and sending enough Congresscritters to D.C. who know better than to cross us to keep the Federal government in relative stasis. And it looks like we'll help elect the most pro-gun President since JFK.
How is a database a sensible measure? Even in your example (like on TV), the crime has already been committed.
We see this in the real world too. After the Pulse massacre, they looked up the gun. Sure enough, it belonged to the shooter, who passed background checks, took training courses, and went through psych evaluations. All of the above (frequently touted) measures were completely ineffective at preventing or even mitigating the disaster.
I too have a genuine desire to stop mass shootings, but the genuine-ness of my desires doesn't necessarily mean effective-ness.
I for one think e.g. the the CDC has one job, one that it's manifestly been failing at as has become obvious with the lab screwups and the Ebola response, and which we may now be seeing with Zika.
As for the lack of trust, the gun control side does not hide its desire for confiscation; how is the other side supposed to have any trust in its good will?
Imagine if the most anti-gun position in America was still very pro-gun people like say Charleton Heston, then I'd be willing for a compromise. I would be ok with building a registry where the police can search for guns.
But the fact is, we know that Hillary Clinton talks about how Australia successfully got rid of all its guns. We know that the ultimate goal isn't a happy compromise in the middle.
This is why the 'cold dead hands' mentality exists in America.
It's like imagine if Republicans want a national registry of people by their religion. Or national ethnicity database. The Democrats wouldn't (and shouldn't) give an inch on that.
This is probably one of the most successful strawmen in all of US politics. I don't think anyone on either side actually believes that the government would ever try to confiscate all guns
Are you serious? I can't determine if you're being sarcastic or not.
Sure the idea has never been formally proposed, because no politician will ever get elected in America if they proposed such idea.
But here's Hillary Clinton for you:
> I do not know enough detail to tell you how we would do it, or how it would work, but certainly the Australian example is worth looking at.<
Now you may say that Hillary Clinton didn't mean gun confiscation by 'Australian example', but it's clear she clearly isn't appalled by Australian gun confiscation.
Why Australian example? Why not Canadian example? Why not French example? Sure maybe this is not a strong correlation.
But then Democrats get caught all the time talking about complete elimination of guns when they think they are not on Camera:
http://dailycaller.com/2015/12/01/maryland-deputy-ag-reveals...
Matt Damon openly supports Australia styles gun confiscation:
http://insider.foxnews.com/2016/07/06/matt-damon-mass-gun-co...
I'm sorry, but I don't believe that the ideal vision of America gun control proponents have is to have no civilian ownership of guns.
Edit: I should have been more general with the "you". Only the opposition to the gun database has succeeded. There's no general conversation about privacy; there's no coalition of pro-privacy orgs with a consistent view on what should and should not be stored in databases. Why is this?
uh, did he say he was?
i'm sorry, did i neglect to read half the article, or half his comment, where these things are mentioned?
There are zero logical reasons to prohibit a database that maps gun metadata to the gun record (search by name is actually detrimental to proper investigations). I've heard lots of emotional reasons, but I haven't heard a single well reasoned logical argument. Just a lot of reductio ad absurdum.
Going way back, the 2nd amendment entitles US citizens to own firearms because it's supposed to be a government for the people, by the people. If the people no longer support the government, they can revolt (ala american revolution). At the time, citizenry owning firearms was sufficient for a revolution to be successful. See 3rd amendment, as well.
So, the 2nd amendment was really an escape clause for citizens if they no longer wish to support the government. It just happened to be written as a gun measure. Having a governmental database controlling gun ownership thus violates that intention.
Vehicles have to be registered, and so should guns. For essentially the very same reasons.
You can't hand wave it into being. I don't see the connection to a registry at all. So you're an evil dictator and want to kill that revolution, what good is a list of 150m individual persons? What good is the mapping from "identification number" to "gun owner"? Is it important which "guns" participate in the revolution? Can anyone tell that?
Let's imagine it's 1860, and the local ex-slave population is acting up. But, you have a registry of all ex-slaves who own guns. You drive around with a posse and confiscate them all before a popular revolution gets going. Is that in the best interests of the local people? Probably not, thus a registry in this context could be used to suppress the citizenry.
The same thing is true today, but realistically there is no way individual gun ownership in 2016 is going to be sufficient to for a population to successfully revolt. It's not like we are letting people own gunships. However, the 2nd amendment hasn't been updated to reflect modern reality. In a lot of ways, this boils down to an "originalist vs living constitutional" argument.
Why don't you trust the populace with their guns rather than ask the populace to trust the gov't with a registry? For X amount of bad things to happen (where X is a large number) you need a lot more coordinated or systemically encouraged action in the first situation whereas in the latter a few insulated members of the elite and a loud lobby by a few interest groups would suffice.
It's all about checks and balances. The second amendment gives some power to the people to revolt (in theory), as a check against government power. If the people need to trust the government not to do something unconstitutional (i.e. not confiscate weapons) for that to be effective, then the check is no longer useful and it defeats the purpose of the second amendment.
Using such a database to deny a citizen the right to purchase a gun would be one way, for example, but I don't see that mentioned here.
Nazi Germany, initially using "well intentioned" Wiemar law, in fact (the period after the WWI defeat was very chaotic and bloody). See this book by the #1 RKBA legal scholar for all the details: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1598131613/
The description also helps confirm this next example:
Any country they invaded with registration lists, including the Netherlands; perhaps the #1 US RKBA activist of the 20th Century got started down that path in basic training after WWII, when a refugee from there related an atrocity he'd witnessed, where a whole family was machine gunned in the village/town square after the head of the household couldn't produce a handgun the register said he had.
The above examples are particularly instructive since by definition you can never know who might in the future use such data for ill.
Soviet Russia if I remember correctly; in fact, if I remember correctly, there was not a single genocide in the 20th Century that wasn't proceeded with the pattern, aside from China, where the Communists instead dried up the supply of guns held by the population by imposing "rifle taxes" on the wealthy. Basically, their life was forfeit unless they supplied the Communists with a certain number of guns, and they moved heaven and earth to do that, not that it did them any good in the end.
Of course, the poorer the population in general, the easier it is to pull of such a gambit, or a registration followed by a confiscation, so many fewer have guns.
Communist Cuba, for sure. They came up with a catchy slogan, got too many people to register, confiscated the guns, and then gangs of them started having fun with their class enemies.
As noted elsewhere in this discussion, in smaller numbers for select types of weapons, with of course the option to remove them from the state, this has happened in California when the status of the obsolescent (but certainly effective, e.g. used by the recent Dallas cop shooter) SKS, and in New York State. Something like it might be playing out right now in Massachusetts as their AG decided to redefine their "assault weapons" law, but she's still changing her not actually all that official position on it (i.e. it's published in unofficial venues like the office's web cite, no proper rule making process was followed).
This isn't the 18th century anymore; handguns and assault rifles won't stand up to tanks and jets.
In many fights of this type (internal) victory doesn't necessarily require militia A defeating army (with tanks) B. It can come from militia A being a large enough PITA to warrant a change in plans, or gathering enough popular engagement and outrage to make a difference, or for members of Army B to say "hey I don't want to shoot (or be shot by) my neighbors in Milita A". FWIW I am not a proponent of armed revolt against our government, but I think your question regarding AR-15s vs M1 Abrams isn't capturing a possible/likely reality.
What about property purchases? Without a county domain registrar on titled property, it's your word versus somebody else's that you own your property. You won't want to buy real property since the government tracks that too (and for centuries) and it's publicly searchable. The government jackboots will say you don't own the land you stand on without that, just like the thugs of the InterNIC/ICANN do regularly with centralized DNS. In short, don't buy real property.
You'll also not want to buy a plane ticket, as those are tracked as well.
Don't open a bank account--your bank will regularly report about you, especially large transfers of money. Find a nice hole in the ground on your untitled real property and convert to metal. Or use Bitcoin if you trust the system enough.
Definitely don't use a cell phone--they can find you.
That's the right kind of person (comp sci and Intelligence background), using science to deal with a kafkaesque situation (no computers allowed) and managing to improve outcomes.
But I do agree, they've implemented some sort of hashing, with several buckets and trees to search from. It may not be efficient compared to actual computer databases, but it's the best humans can do with O(log n). Space requirement is still unfortunately O(n) but hopefully PDFs will help the ATF guys.
If anything I'm saying that I'm happy people are recognizing that Computer Science has applications outside of computers, and is practically Applied Maths. A bachelor's degree in CS is only 2-3 math courses away from a minor in Maths.
The irony is that a computer scientist is helpful in a computer-less environment. I guess you could say the human mind is a very advanced computer. It may not seem ironic to everyone on HN, but to the layman, what on earth could a CS person do with no computers? And the answer is a lot. After all Djikstra handwrote his algorithms on paper.
Now, if we just could de-fang Google, Facebook, the advertising networks that track users across websites and all the other data aggregators!
People don't become alcoholic because powerful beer industry spent money on preventing laws against alcohol.
Perhaps you're right, and we need to treat our countries addiction to guns instead of trying to reduce the supply.
Fixed it for you, as my side sees it.
There's no 'addiction' to Gun. I am an immigrant myself, and before coming to America I was anti-gun. Now, I am not scare of guns anymore and consider it to be a great social good.
Money's important, but you can ask the most recent stark example, Jeb Bush, just how far it gets you without votes.
And I'll add that only happened after there was a sufficient trail of dead or maimed bodies, enough atrocities committed by the BATFE starting in the early '70s (new law + sugar price supports putting their "revenuers" out of a job when moonshine became a hobby), that we got riled up enough to achieve this. As of yet, our lack of data privacy hasn't produced enough of these.
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
You can see this underlying (and, to many modern folks, uncomfortable) reality being admitted to implicitly when they go after long guns first, despite the fact that long guns account for a vanishingly small amount of total gun crime. Long guns are excellent for challenging an overreaching central government, however.
The government can run through the physical paperwork (held by dealers), but it's slow, inaccurate and inefficient. Many people think that is a feature.
[The funny thing about "assault weapon" bans is that of two firearms that are functionally identical, one will be banned because it merely looks evil -- black and creepy looking -- while the other will be explicitly allowed in legislation. It's political posturing that just creates more criminals and does nothing to address the underlying causes of violence, namely failed socio-economic policies and the war on drugs, which creates a nice, solid economic base for gangs].
If that is the only issue, I would construct a database that maps (gun type, serial number) to physical location ((microfiche, page, row) or (binder, page, row)). That should speed up look ups by (gun type, serial number) tremendously, but still would require one to go through all physical data to search by name.
.. and that's how you get thousands of armed protestors demanding that your organisation be shut down and your records destroyed. It doesn't matter what the proposed contents of the database are. The politics is extremely volatile and not very rational.
(Even the IRA were finally persuaded to put their weapons "permanently beyond use", in the language of the peace agreement.)
From someone who's been in this fight since the early '70s, nope, the gun manufacturers' lobby, the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF, http://nssf.org/), is a very small political player.
The gun owners lobby, especially the NRA, yes, the appearance of symbiosis is to a great extent true, but that took decades to achieve, not until the 1977 Cincinnati Revolt, and it wasn't until the 1994 "assault weapons" ban that a Federal gun control law was passed without the NRA's blessing.
We're much bigger, gun and ammo manufacturing isn't a very big industry as these things go. 5 million people in the NRA, at least half the people in the US (last survey, 45% willing to admit to it)? Much larger.
> He got to the National Tracing Center in 2005. He never expected to stay. It was a stepping stone to maybe a cushier deal maybe up at headquarters in D.C.
> But then he started to think about ways to work with the antiquated system—and make it more efficient. Would it even be possible? “You mind if I do the whiteboard thing?” he says, standing up.
> ‘Well, that looks like what I'm looking for.’ Six Sigma, you know that kind of stuff?'
> “I just found it at Barnes & Noble,” he says, in a tone suggesting that this shit is basic.
> He uses the blue marker. “I mean, I know that the average person can type in 1,600 gun descriptions per eight-hour day,” he says, scrawling the numbers. “Why? Because I time-and-motion studied them. And then—I don't know if you know anything about queuing theory.
>Do you have one line with three cash registers—or do you have three lines come into one?” Arrows, circles. He's moved on to the black marker.
>“There's a whole science of mathematics behind queuing theory. So what we did was, I sat around trying to figure out what would be the best way to queue the traces up and punch them through....
>And now? Despite no increase in budget, no new technology, no new staff: “I'm doing twice as many guns, twice as fast, and almost twice as accurately as we did when I got here in 2005.”
What would happen if ammo was taxed the same way cigarettes are in the USA?
An example, someone buys a semi-automatic gun or automatic weapon...well than the ammo is taxed at a modest 5000%.
You can have the guns all you want..but if you want to use them you pay the right cost to the degree of dangerous of the gun weapon...ie automatic ammo is taxed higher than say shotgun shells.
State, both local, US states and federal would be exempt from the ammo tax.
Also, there isn't a meaningful distinction between ammunition used in semi-automatic vs other types. 9mm is 9mm is 9mm, whether you're shooting it out of a Glock or a revolver or a single-shot target pistol. Same thing with rifle ammunition - NATO 5.56x45 tends to be what a lot of AR-15 variants, the so-called "assault weapons" are chambered in, but there's no reason you couldn't also have a bolt-action hunting rifle in the same caliber.
My father's primary hunting partner when I started hunting had a .222 bolt action rifle; if this had happened later, it would undoubtedly be a .223 due to the reduced costs of the 5.56/.223 ecosystem.
The classic centerfire flat-nosed Winchester cartridges, though, you can of course reload them after getting some modern ammo for it (don't try this with old mercury fulminate primed ammo, I read an article by someone who had an old Browning police semi-auto carbine, he wrecked it because the mercury fatally compromises the strength of the brass). My father has or had one of those, I think it was from the era when you could buy one with the same ammo for your handgun as your rifle, the action certainly wasn't very strong. Octagonal barrel, a really neat piece of history.
Ah, and for those who aren't into this sort of thing, all the "calibers" I mentioned in my above comment use bullets of the same width, it's a confusing "system", if you can call it that, it grew organically.
On a side note, manufacturing guns and ammo at home is not incredibly hard. Granted, you won't get the same result as if you bought something from the store, but they will function all the same.
What would you say if a state decided to impose a 5000% tax on abortion medicines?
What would you expect the courts to say about these taxes?
(Incidentally, this is not so different than the Mariana Islands' $1000 handgun tax. I thought this was currently being litigated, but I can't find anything confirming that.)
A variation on this theme already happens with cigarettes, when one state raises tobacco taxes, bootlegging from neighbouring states goes up.
Now the responsible gun owners are no longer a very good shot, criminals are roaming around with plenty of ammo (which they need because they often have terrible aim), what could possibly go wrong?
It would also strong discourage responsible gun ownership, by discouraging people from maintaining their skills. There are, what, way over 12 million who have concealed carry licenses in the US (the number is growing very rapidly and 12 or 12.5 is only the latest and a bit old), more and more states dropping license requirements (it's up to around 10, with Missouri likely to be added this month), and semi-automatic handguns are the overwhelmingly preferred design to carry for many good ergonomic, reliablity and effectiveness reasons.
Legally owned full-auto weapons simply aren't a problem, there's 2 known crimes committed with them, and one of those was by a police officer.... With their numbers limited by a 1986 law to around 200,000, and the inherent cost of firing lots of rounds from them, they're already mostly "a hobby for the rich" as c22 points out. Something you can see echoed in the former Democratic governor of Kansas Kathleen Sebelius signing a law making them legal again after many many decades.
Personal security isn't a 'hobby', it's a right. A right which isn't acknowledged by most other countries, nor by a significant chunk of our population. Rights shouldn't be prohibited by taxes. Rights shouldn't only be accessible to rich people.
You don't think self-defense is a right, you see guns as a problem (like Cigarette), so your solution is the same (tax).
Don't try to circumvent the real topic here, do you think people have a right to defend themselves using guns or not, if not then try to convince me about it, instead of suggesting 'fixes'.
Say you were looking for (to use the article's example) a 9-mm semi-automatic Beretta 92 sold at Annie's Get Your Gun, serial number ABC123.
You have the scans of all the Form 4473s put into folders (or maybe not, maybe just everything in a dump), and tell the bot to go looking for any form that matches this pattern. Importantly, the bot would NOT cache or structure data for later lookups; every search would be virgin.
You'd have a lot of false positives (the O 0 and I 1 problem), it would not be terribly helpful at handwritten forms, but it could reduce a pile of a million records down to, hopefully, a few hundred or thousand.
Seems that either the author doesn't understand how the 4473 works, or Charlie. Most likely both. A Form 4473 defines the possessor of the firearm like the IP address defines the user of the Internet connection.
The possessor is determined by the gun being found by local law enforcement finding an individual, A, in posession of the gun in question.
A trace request is submitted. The gun (in police custody after being found in A's possession) is associated with a form 4473. That 4473 is found, and the original purchaser is indicated to be A.
The quotes excerpted in this article seem to be missing a lot of context and to have come from longer discussions that are noted to be emotional in many cases. I am interpreting that quote as part of a longer conversation where the speaker is jumping around a lot.
The whiteboard section clearly indicates that Charlie does not necessarily express his thoughts linearly and in an easy-for-the-author-to-follow manner.
Educated or knowledgeable is all you need, those who know about the history of confiscations and often genocides following gun registration are of course afraid to let the government know.
Or let me ask you, how do you know the government will stay as minimally benevolent as it already is? Especially with it's trending not so benevolent in the last few decades, as, for example, peace officers morphed into warrior cops? The War on (Some) Drugs, anyone?? What else might dissuade you of this notion you implicitly admit to?
Weird? Disappointed? We're out-grouped? Maybe so, but that doesn't mean we're actually wrong, you know.
As I relate in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12425485 in living memory, invaders have used your country's gun registration list to confiscate all the people's firearms, with public execution of whole families as a penalty for not producing a gun on the list.
Oh, and owning a firearm in Europe is most certainly not prohibited, and that's not counting Switzerland, although the reported figures for the Netherlands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_guns_per_c... look close to a total de jure prohibition.
I guess the post-WWII ruling class was satisfied with what the Nazis wrought on its people; you certainly are....
Does that mean the paper files can't be sorted alphabetically by name?
Does it exclude more complex paper-based search systems, like needle-sorted edge-notched cards?
Or does it only refer to computer databases?
However, I'm not an American so I wouldn't presume to tell you what to do with your own country. You're welcome! /s
But at what point does it become a database and searchable, does he have to deliberately pile up the boxes of receipts higgledy-piggledy lest they accidentally fall into some sort of organised and therefore searchable order? Seems crazily broad, no?
Edited to Add: Wow, form 4473 doesn't get sent to any kind of centralised place until the gun shop that sold the particular con goes out of business. So this to my mind means a family gun business this been open for 100 years has every 4473 form they've ever written since the law came in, am I reading that right? Surely that can't be right? As in not correct, I don't mean morally, I mean that's just crazy to have a central database that doesn't centralise regularly.
Personally I think the 4473s should be destroyed after a reasonable time, and never subject to bulk capture. It's no business of the government's what purchases I make.
In all those countries with stricter gun laws, how many more times are those defenseless grandmothers been assaulted than in the US? I believe it's a fraction, perhaps even a small fraction.
In the US, how many times has a child picked up a gun and killed someone by accident? More times than grandmothers have defended themselves, or less?
How many times has a police officer shot someone for worries that the officer's own life was in danger of being shot, only to find that the person had no weapon?
How many times have SWAT and no-knock warrants been justified for worries that the person being served might be armed? And of those, how many people have died? And how many died when the police went to the wrong house?
How come having a gun didn't help Clarence Daniels keep from being assaulted by Michael Foster? http://www.motherjones.com/mixed-media/2015/01/black-man-gun...
Regarding your last sentence, I think real estate titles have shown some of the advantages to having the government track who has purchased a piece of property, so I disagree with your blanket statement.
Easily less, there are only ~600 accidental firearms fatalities a year, and we managed to get that number down from ~800 in 1980 in a period when both the population and and the number of guns it owns have increased by very roughly 50%.
Those warrior cops you cite two examples of? We still had a huge gun owning population back when they were peace officers, it's not guns per se that have resulted in that change.
Real estate titles are a very different thing, I submit to you, in that trying to take someone else's land has a much longer and greater pedigree than their weapons, and for entirely different motives.
I believe the higher number includes grandmothers who defended herself with a weapon without firing it, in which case the balance has to include all crimes which were committed with a gun.
Really I'm annoyed with kabdib for using a hypothetical scenario to justify personal gun ownership, when for decades everyone has pointed out how meaningless such scenarios are for meaningful policy change.
I never said it was "guns per se". I'm well aware of countries like Switzerland and Finland with a high gun ownership, though not as high as the US, and don't have the same sorts of gun-related violence.
I agree that real estate and vehicle titles are different things. My point was that I disagreed with the blanket statement "It's no business of the government's what purchases I make."
Substitute "aged grandma" with "anyone weaker than an attacker" being able to successfully make themselves an unattractive target, and it's going to be a pretty significant number. Figures are debated on both sides.
Real-estate titles appear to be more about taxation and revenue generation than anything else. Take away that incentive and you'll find governments doing a crappy job of it.
Since the law have been set up to prohibit the government from gathering that information, of course it's uncertain - the law was designed so there's a grey area. So, since you don't have numbers (which is why you propose the scenario instead), what about answer the question which isn't subject to statistics gathering?
How come having a gun didn't help Clarence Daniels keep from being assaulted by Michael Foster?
Second, is anyone on my side arguing guns are a panacea to all self-defense problems and situations? As it was, Daniels got roughed up, Foster was found guilty of battery, the system worked pretty well, didn't it?
You started by saying the grandmother needed it to defend herself against assault. I gave an example of an assault where a weapon proved worse than useless.
You did not say the grandmother needed it to defend herself against manslaughter or attempted manslaughter, which is what it would have been had the level of force risen to lethal.
You said a weapon was useful so ""anyone weaker than an attacker" being able to successfully make themselves an unattractive target." Yet here was a case where the presence of a gun made the victim an attractive target for assault.
In short, I said nothing that you said I said...
I commented on the assault on Clarence Daniels simply because it made a big stir in RKBA circles and therefore I know a fair amount about it, and I felt you were misrepresenting its lessons, as well as possibly the law.
And misinformation on when you're allowed to use lethal force is downright dangerous, although this case is relatively close to the threshold, depending on how effective the perpetrator's choke-hold was (it was said to be not very good). I also presume this 62 year old man was a lot more fit and strong than an "80-year-old grandmother" (especially having watched my parents make the transition from late '60s to early '80s or thereabouts in the last dozen years, kinda scary).
The Firearm Owners Protection Act, this referenced part: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearm_Owners_Protection_Act#...
(Speaking of which, sorting machines and punched card I/O is an active hobby market. Apparently many people are looking for IBM punched cards. I think there's enough of a market should a small paper company want to sell them again.)