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AR15's are not Hunting Rifles.
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2024
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Truly "Universal" background checks are just a way of criminalizing the overwhelming majority of "transfers" between known and trusted parties. We don't need this sort of "universal" background check. This approach is only intended to cast FUD on ownership.
The current law basically says it is illegal to "knowingly" transfer a gun to a prohibited person. The problem is that there is no reliable, publicly-accessible means for a private individual to "know" that an individual is prohibited. NICS checks are not available to the public; they are only available to FFL dealers. So long as the recipient doesn't disclose their prohibited status, it is basically impossible to prove a private seller "knew" the buyer was prohibited.
The solution should be obvious: establish a means of publicly accessing NICS. Have the buyer perform a check in themselves, and provide the seller with a verification code to securely and confidentially access the results of that check.
With that access in place, a seller can know, and can legally be expected to know the status of a buyer. The "knowingly" criteria can now be presumed to have been met, and willful ignorance on the part of the seller is no longer a viable defense.
This approach makes it possible to prosecute 100% of private sellers who transfer to felons, without criminalizing any innocent transfers. It accomplishes every legitimate purpose of "universal" background checks, without any of the harmful, "unintended" FUD that truly universal checks would impose.
Nope. Because you can know and trust that felon white supremacist militia man all day. The rest of us would very much like to prevent them from getting a gun ever again. And the honesty system obviously isn't working.
Hoping people just use the system isn't any better either.
Requiring an FFL to be part of all transfers and keeping the records solves this. And black helicopter paranoia isn't a good reason to not do it.
If I handed a gun to that individual today, without knowing he was a felon, I would be exonerated: I didn't know.
If I did it tomorrow, after NICS checks are made available to the public, I would be convicted: I should have known. My claim of ignorance no longer exonerates me. My claim of ignorance is now an admission of guilt: I could have known, I should have known, I was responsible for knowing, and I failed to perform my due diligence and duty.
Define "transfer".
When my neighbor says he's feeling low and needs me to take custody of his guns for awhile, does he need to conduct a background check to give them to me? Or can I walk over and take care of them? If I am injured in a car crash, can I hand my gun to my sister before the ambulance takes me to the hospital?
My brother and I both have Glock 17 handguns. We used them at the range. A few weeks later, I looked at the serial number on my gun and realized we had swapped them. Should we both be jailed?
The punishment for violating this "universal" background check requirement is going to have to be a simple fine at most; anything more is going to be an egregious miscarriage of justice in all of these cases and in virtually every scenario in which it could be applied. It will be treated about the same as failing to renew a driver's license or vehicle registration; a purely administrative offense.
Your mentality of treating guns as "NBD" is the real issue here. Guns have been dumbed down and ingrained so heavily into our society, that you almost jokingly say how you "switched guns at one point".
All of that absolutely should be illegal. And we shouldn't be so careless with our weapons, as you make it sound so normal to have done.
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.