Applying commonsense to gun laws

Alan doesn’t spell it quite as clearly as I would like but he does explain what President Obama and the ATF want to do “is strictly forbidden under federal law”.

What should have been said is that in order to know if “multiple rifle sales are made to the same buyer within a five-day period” there needs to be central records kept of firearms sales. If such a central record store does not exist then it is trivial to defeat the reporting requirement. The multiple firearm buyer merely goes down the street and purchases a single firearm from every dealer. As far as each of the dealers is concerned it was a single firearm sale. The only way to block this “loophole” is a firearm owner registry maintained by a single entity. It is illegal for any Federal agency to create such a registry.

Even if the individual states were to do this long guns may be purchased in states other than your home state so the loophole would exist even if implemented by the states. Instead of going down the street the buyers would have to cross the state lines but in many locations that wouldn’t be that big of a issue.

In addition to such a registry being illegal a firearms owners registry in this country would be a huge failure with massive disobedience on a scale much larger than that experienced by Canada’s boondoggle.

Commonsense says that if it is illegal and it wouldn’t work even if it were legal any effort expended on the plan is wasted. Surely we can all agree that government waste is something to avoid.

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3 thoughts on “Applying commonsense to gun laws

  1. That’s well and good, but I’d rather apply the principles of liberty to gun laws. Same for the War on Drugs, which is what we’re actually talking about here.

    The reason we’re talking about multiple gun sales at all it because we have extremely rich, and therefore extremely powerful, violent criminal organizations. The reason we have extremely powerful violent criminal organizations is because we have a government enforced monopoly in the drug trade, reserved exclusively for the most violent criminal organizations. There is virtually no such thing as contraband in a free society, and thus there is nothing for criminal organizations to make that much money on. They are then no more than petty criminals.

    Even with those serious breeches of liberty, the idea that American gun laws could touch the crime gangs is laughable at best. As I’ve been saying, shouting from my little soap box, the crime gangs couldn’t give a wet fig about getting their guns in the U.S. They’re more expensive here, and they have millions of them available to them in their own country and others around the world, at lower prices. The only reason they’ve been going for large number of guns from the U.S. is because the criminals within our own government set it up.

    So I’d say the OP, though making a cogent and valid point, is focusing on a few hairs on the ass of the elephant that’s in our living room, or maybe it’s focusing on the whole tail of the elephant. The tail may be got rid of, but the elephant is still taking up most of the room, eating everything in sight and shitting all over the place, only now it’s pissed off for having had its tail cut off.

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