| Author | Message | ||
     Froggy |
https://www.gq.com/story/inside-federal-bureau-of- way-too-many-guns Very good read, I know many of you will find interesting | ||
| Hootowl |
I'd be willing to bet that most guns used in crimes are stolen. Gun registry doesn't do much good. On the other hand, as we learned post Katrina, it makes a handy list for politicians to use for the confiscation of private property. | ||
| Ferris_von_bueller |
File the serial number off. | ||
| Hootowl |
For example, if the police find my Sig at a crime scene, it'll trace back to a federal agent, not me. Swat team at midnight at the wrong house. | ||
| Figorvonbuellingham |
Saw a thing on the news today where they are trying to pass legislation to serialize each individual bullets so they can trace a bullet to the buyer.} | ||
| Torquehd |
I wouldn't bet that most guns used for criminal purposes are stolen; however, I would be willing to bet that more than half of them are not in the hands of the person who originally made the purchase and passed the background check. That doesn't necessarily imply nefarious activity, guns trade hands every day under legal circumstances with no paper trail. Have you seen those ridiculous youtube "open carry" videos, where folks open carry in places where they know they're going to get apprehended by the police? I saw one where this idiot was walking through downtown Vancouver WA with an AR15, and when the cops arrived (who seem to be totally clueless as to the 2nd amendment), they ask, "is that gun registered to you?" Although the guy who made the video was an attention seeking moron; i have to say, if I was in his shoes, I would have said, "NO! This is America, and we are not required to register our guns here! There's not even a system that mandates or regulates gun registry." And as for the hypothetical; why would you ever discard your weapon ANYWHERE???? Edit: Go ahead, serialize each bullet. It makes no difference to a man with a dremel tool! Not to mention the thousands of folks who are already reload! (Message edited by torquehd on September 02, 2016) | ||
| Pwnzor |
Would be a shame if something happened to all those records... | ||
| Torquehd |
If the Sec of State can delete thousands of official (FOUO, secret, and TS/TS-SCI) emails that were stored on a private server... What's to stop a playboy billionaire who becomes president from migrating thousands of gigs of info collected by the NSA to his own "classified" server, then accidentally deleting it? (windows 10 wouldn't update, so I had to run the windows recovery disk and lost everything. What?...) | ||
| Ratbuell |
"....and my staff, who wasn't cleared to handle this information in the first place but whom I trusted to tell me how to do all this, didn't hold my hand and make sure I did it correctly..." | ||
| Reepicheep |
I get the spirit of that article, really. But at the end of the day, it reduces to "if everything were easy, and everyone was nice, we could do a really good job of using gun registry and tracing to fight crime". The problem is, that if everything were easy, and everything was nice, we wouldn't have any crime to fight. At one end of the spectrum, you really would have to be a world class idiot to not believe that people with a lot of power are just drooling to get a national registry of guns and gun owners as the most critical step to their passionate desire to force everyone (including many millions of the most law abiding citizens the planet has ever seen) to disarm. It's just a fact. So all the controls in place around how the records are retained, how they are tracked, how the automation can be applied, who can see what, etc, aren't just some kind of crazy tinfoil hat archaic bureaucracy, they are the kind of things that the ACLU should and would be fighting to the death for, except applied to the second amendment instead of the first. So get past the whole "this is being done because it's stupid" naive belief. Then look at the control itself. If I sell or give a gun to a person who is not constitutionally allowed to posses a gun, two felonies have already been committed. I committed one by giving the gun, they committed one by taking the gun. So outside of a background check, you really only have three scenarios: 1) Somebody providing a gun to someone they have very high confidence can posses a firearm. Maybe a family member or friend they have known well all their life, maybe somebody with a concealed carry permit that demonstrates they successfully passed even more rigorous background checks. 2) Somebody willing to potentially provide a gun to a prohibited person (in other words, a criminal) 3) Somebody too stupid to know how to avoid providing a gun to a prohibited person (in other words, a criminal, who is stupid). So every time you hear the phrase "gun show loophole", you can safely dismiss most of everything else that person is saying as either uninformed or disingenuous. If I buy from a "gun store" (including most booths at gun shows), I will fill out a federal form, and the seller will get on the phone with the FBI, and they will read the information. The information is, well, pretty much everything. SSN, what crimes I have been convicted of, if I am on certain medications, if I am under a restraining order, if I am undergoing treatment for mental illness, etc. It's a level of scrutiny that would be illegal in pretty much *every* other context. If I lie on that form, it is a crime (not sure if it is a felony or not, anyone know?). I can choose not to answer parts of it, but if I do, the FBI on the other end of the phone can simply decline to approve the sale. So after the FBI gets every a staggering amount of private and personal information about me that I give them, and then vets that against a staggering amount of personal information about me that they have collected elsewhere and that I can't get, they decide if I am prohibited from owning a firearm, or if they need more information, or if I am allowed to take possession. I pay for this check. Guess who advocated for this system? The NRA, and gun owners everywhere. Did they do this because they want an FBI agent crawling up their knickers just so they can exercise a constitutional right? No, they did it because they think its a terrible idea for criminals to possess a firearm, and they have voluntarily sacrificed a staggering amount of privacy (in return for some promises of timeliness, accuracy, and data retention) to help keep guns out of the hands of criminals. So all those controls that author cackles about, as someone who doesn't have any interest in the constitutional right in play, already represent a very painful trade off in freedom and privacy in order to try and achieve some safety. Then for the "gun tracing". A gun is a collection of metal parts, like a motorcycle, but much much simpler (as few as 10 simple parts). The serial number is just stamped into the frame. It's made up by the manufacturer, like a VIN, and it could be tracked as it moves through legal transactions. But that, as a general rule, wouldn't help much. If you want to use a gun for a crime, you can do a few easy things: 1) Steal one. Stuff is hard to protect, including guns, and plenty are stolen. These guns then circulate through the underground. So tracking this gun doesn't take you to the criminal, it takes you to another victim (of theft). Gun theft is already illegal, and should already be really aggressively prosecuted. If this path of tracing was going to be effective, it would already be effective, and gun thieves would be in jail before they could commit other crimes. 2) Buy one legally, and remove the serial number. This turns out to be a little harder then one would think, because even when you remove the SN there are residual stresses in the metal that can (with a lot of work) sometimes recover the SN. But that is expensive, unreliable, and hit and miss, so this is still pretty easy. Other strategies for marking guns with SN's that cant be removed are first usually science fiction, and secondly irrelevant anyway because guns already built, going back more than 100 years, are very effective and "already there". So fairytales of unicorns aside, there just aren't practical ways to accomplish this. It's like saying I am going to solve the pollution problem by creating a battery that makes megawatt of power, weighs one pound, never wears out, and costs $1. That's awesome, aside from the part that you can't. Registering and tracking ammo gets even sillier. It is even simpler to fabricate than a gun, and there is even more ammo out there already then there are guns. Then look at the impacts of decision versus the degree of solution. How many million legal gun owners are you going to F over in order to stop a very small number of criminals. Easy to say we should do if it's not your toe getting stepped on, but if we followed that logic out, nobody would be allowed to have a vehicle, nobody would be allowed to have Internet, make it illegal to be a poor black young man, and nobody would be allowed to leave their house. All would be "more effective" at stopping violent crime then gun confiscation, and all of which should be done first if you are intellectually honest about what you are doing, and all of which would be a cure far worse than the disease. So that's why we don't do this stuff. It just doesn't work, or doesn't work well enough, or is more evil then the thing it is trying to achieve. I'd like an intellectually honest discussion about gun crime (on both sides), that is really the only way to improve things. That article isn't it. I also had a conversation with a retired Philly detective. I was asking him (honestly) about gun tracing, etc. He wasn't a gun guy, he carried a BMG around Vietnam and a side arm around Philly and frankly didn't want anything more to do with them. He told me a story about busting a guy he knew was up to something, but he couldn't prove it. After finding a gun hidden in a grandfather clock while doing a search warrant, he called back to whatever government office did this sort of thing, and read them the serial number from the gun to have them check it. After 5 minutes, the guy on the phone came back and said "nope, it comes back clean". The detective "had a feeling", and told the guy "would you mind double checking that for me, and my supervisor wants your name also for the report" (a lie). 15 minutes later, the guy gets back on the phone and says "hey, guess what? I found a record after all, that gun was reported stolen in murder / robbery two years ago." A good detective, that one. So even where the current system "works", it often doesn't work, unless people are smart and do hard work. And when people are smart and do hard work, they have most of the tools that will help them already. | ||
| Rick_a |
All it does is determine the original purchaser, if purchased or transferred at an FFL. There is no centralized database as 1.) It's extremely expensive and inefficient to implement 2.) Governments have a history of abusing such powers 3.) It's been determined to be unconstitutional The federal, state, and local laws regarding firearms are already a convoluted labyrinth of largely feel good nonsense thanks to eighty plus years of allowing government intervention on our behalf. If it's still tough for the government to easily trace every gun on the planet, that's too bad. It should be about the crime and criminal, not the gun. It's always an emotional plea against guns. I'm not buying into that nonsense aside from getting all the ones I want and enough ammo to keep well stocked and properly trained. It's not P.C. to believe in our rights, our freedoms, and racist believe in law and order. Apparently only bigots love America these days. Screw those guys. All opposition to obvious ploys to subvert the people is labeled a great "right wing conspiracy." Sorry, but that only works on people that have been dead or asleep for the past few decades. Not trusting your government maintains a healthy outlook. The left hates guns. They don't trust you. They're soft on criminals but tough on their opposition. I take issue with that. This is a bit outdated as less are coming from retail stores these days:  I'm sure "universal background checks" will stop all that  Hillary believes the 2nd Amendment as interpreted as an individual right is wrong. She believes without Scalia that consistent opposition to unconstitutional interpretations is gone. She has said that the "Australian model" is worth looking at. They have no right to bear arms, there is onerous licensing, transportation,and usage restrictions ("sporting" purposes only), and self defense with a firearm carries heavy penalties. So when these liberals and Democrats say gun owners and the NRA don't care about safety or "gun violence" I get a bit offended. Education, training, and enforcement seems like a way to go if they cared about the people. They'd rather keep the people ignorant and subservient and criminals and themselves empowered. We already have a registration system of our "most dangerous" weapons in the NFA. If waiting six months to year and paying extra for a not any more dangerous than any other firearms you can buy off the shelf seems like a great idea, have at it. | ||
| Two_seasons |
Excellent postings past the initial link. Thanks for thinking and sharing your thoughts. | ||
| Ducbsa |
The writer acts like it is incredible that the Gov't would use a good database to confiscate. Apparently in denial about using the IRS to penalize "Enemies of the State." |
