General Zod wrote:Here's an idea, why not just ban private sales? That would eliminate a significant chunk of the loopholes that exist for felons to get weapons. If you want to sell your guns as an individual, you need to go to a licensed dealer or pawn shop to sell them.
People willing to sell guns to criminals aren't going to obey that law.
The only way to enforce it would be to have a gun registry and require everyone who owns a gun to show up on a regular basis affirming that they do, in fact, still have the gun.
That's going to be a very,
very intrusive bureaucratic requirement. We'd need a list of the hundreds of millions of guns in America. If people are having to carry them in to state offices so that they can be checked off on the list as "still belong to rightful owner," how many guns can one clerk check off the list in a year? We'd probably have to do the checks at something like yearly intervals. Maybe, oh... every two years. Estimate 300 million guns in America, that means 150 million guns to check off per year. How many guns can one clerk check in one day? If they're doing their job carefully and filing the paperwork properly, it probably takes at least a few minutes per gun. Factoring in bureaucratic overhead I doubt they can work more than six hours a day on checking off guns, so each clerk gets in something like 100 guns per day, and works for about 250 days a year... So you need forty clerks to check a million guns a year, and that's a rather optimistic estimate. To do all the guns in America, once every two years, you'd need 150 times forty is six thousand clerks.
And again, that's an optimistic estimate, based on the assumption that each gun takes an average of five minutes of the clerk's time to identify, verify, and file paperwork on. And that the clerks are available to do this every work day.
So basically, you need five to ten thousand gun registry clerks nationwide, all of whom have to be familiar enough with firearms to identify the guns they're supposed to be checking off on the list. And their
only job is to check off the guns on the registry, while all the many millions of gun owners wait in line a la the DMV, carrying with them hundreds or thousands of dollars' worth of guns.
On top of that, we'd need some way of tracking the guns that get stolen- and gun thefts would be going up because we're requiring people to carry their guns around in public and openly declare that they possess them, which makes them easier and more attractive targets for theft. We need mechanisms to enforce compliance, costing more manpower. But we must not enforce it too harshly, because for every gun that is unlawfully sold by the real owner, there will be a number of guns that are stolen and sold, or lost or broken, or people who just plain forget to come in for licensing, or who view the act of refusing to register their guns as civil disobedience.
Plus, of course, the massive up front cost of registering all 300 million guns in anything like a timely manner. How do we do that, exactly? The honor system?
And the gun lobby will fight all this tooth and nail, because they expect such registries to be used to confiscate guns for petty or dubiously legal reasons... because
this has already happened when gun control politicians willfully poison their own wells by expanding their registration and control laws out of proportion to what they originally negotiated with the gun lobby for.
Elheru Aran wrote:MKSheppard wrote:General Zod wrote:Turns out banning private sales is unenforceable unless everyone does it? Who fucking knew.
1968 called and said "well, um about that...we kind of banned all out-of-state sales for handguns forty-seven years ago."
Do you have a point, considering he pretty much noted what you were getting at with your last post, or are you just continuing your usual style of trolling by data-dumping about your little slice of the States without any relevant analysis and acting like it applies across the board to everything?
Frankly all through this thread, Shep, you've been dumping sheets and sheets of data about Maryland and Baltimore. That's fine, and some of it's actually useful... but you're acting like it's demonstrating that gun control is useless in general, and not bothering to do any analysis apart from picking terminology to little wee quivering bits.
How about you start talking about what you think would actually work as far as gun control goes?
Actually I think he has a point. Do we have evidence that Virginia, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and so on ARE ignoring the laws on handgun sales to out-of-state residents?
