this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2024
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You're going to have to explain how my brother's Glock 17 is somehow a significant threat to public safety in my hands, while my own Glock 17 is perfectly safe.
While you're contemplating that, try this one on for size: under a "universal" system, a felon in possession of a gun cannot be charged for transferring to another felon. There is case law on this point, relating to felons failing to register firearms. The state cannot compel an individual to admit to or to commit a crime. Requiring FFL involvement constitutes either self incrimination or entrapment should the felon attempt to make the transfer through them, so he cannot be prosecuted for failing to use one.
Under my scheme, however, the seller's status is entirely irrelevant. The state merely needs to prove the seller made the transfer and the buyer was prohibited. The seller could know, and should know the buyer's status, and is criminally liable for not checking. A felon-seller can be charged both for simple possession and for transferring to another felon.
The danger is you being so non-chalant about your weapons that you do not realize you have just swapped them. There are a billion scenarios in which doing so gets you arrested even today with current laws.
You can act as tough and mighty as you'd like, but viewing guns in this way, and acting so non-chalant about them is how people get killed.
There probably are. But that wasn't the question. The question was about the danger to the public in this specific scenario. The only difference is the serial number. What significantly greater danger is the public in from the differing inscriptions stamped into our receivers?
The correct and obvious answer is, of course, "none at all", which is why I raised the point to begin with. The fact that I could be "arrested even today with current laws" demonstrates that such laws are not actually enhancing public safety, and should be adjusted so that they don't criminalize completely inoffensive acts.
Ayaaa, we had a conversation a while ago about this same topic. I do think you are still correct in your proposal to make NICS public, but I do also think that the other guy is perhaps partially right. I think such a law would probably be well-accompanied by requirements to own a gun safe (which might be seen as increasing the cost of ownership and thus discriminating and yadda yadda yadda shit I don't care about), and to keep guns in said gun safe when perhaps they're not being kept immediately on your person barring extraneous circumstances. I can't quite recall, but I do believe we also talked about that last time, that there was a kind of need for common sense pertaining to the handling of guns, more than there is, considering how many guns are overwhelmingly passed into illegal uses through relatively simple theft.
I'm also not sure I agree that a violation of the background check, being a fine, is going to have much of an effect. If the fine is cheap enough, that might well enough be just free license to pass guns into an illegal domain and then pay the fine and go about your day. It may increase the costs of illegal firearms well enough which might have knock-on effects in decreasing illegal access to and usage of guns, and what have you, but I think it would probably require a more severe punishment than a fine a la a traffic ticket.
But then, maybe if that's the metaphor we're using, then along the lines of traffic tickets, maybe we should just be, uhh, designing the roads differently, whatever that equivalent might look like for guns, but I think that might be stretching the metaphor a little too much.