I just wanted to bring up one other reason the loophole is a fallacy and the claim is a deliberate lie. Now that others have explained to you about the private sale and we all understand the potential problem with it (yes, a person may unknowingly sell to a felon - if they do it knowingly they are committing a crime), I wanted to show you why the loophole itself claim is a lie and why the private sellers are the real target.Purplehood wrote:I have noticed that the majority (99.9%) of posters on this forum absolutely and unequivocally believe that there is in reality no "gunshow loophole".
The claim made about the gun show loophole is that the guns are being sold by "unlicensed dealers". Of course, the Brady Campaign will say they are not trying to stop some private individual from selling his gun, but they are worried about all of these unlicensed dealers selling. But, there is no such thing as a legal unlicensed dealer. As I was pointing out, if a person is in the business of selling firearms, the federal law requires a license. It is a felony to be in the business and not have the license. And the really neat part of the law is that it does not define what is meant by in the business. Obviously, profit is not part of the equation (many businesses make no profit for years). No where is the number of firearms sold stated as a guide, either.
If I make a habit of buying one firearm each month at the gunshow and then selling it the next month, the ATF could call me a dealer. I might be able to defend myself in court by explaining that I just like to try a lot of different guns as a hobby and show I did not ever try to make a profit on them (the intent might help but is not part of the law), but this is not a sure defense. Another example is if I have been collecting firearms for several decades and now want to liquidate my collection. I set up a table and put 100 guns on it. Am I a dealer now? The ATF might claim so and I might be able to defend against it, but it is not a sure thing.
But if I am a dealer and do not have a license, I am committing crimes. It seems like it would be fairly easy to make the case against me for being an "unlicensed dealer" if I set up at more than one gun show. And if I am a licensed dealer, the same laws apply to me at the gun show as at my store.
Thus, there is no such thing as a gunshow loophole. I am either a legal dealer obeying the law, a felon committing crimes, or a private individual selling my personal property.
If the Brady bunch want to have a debate on the reasonability of requiring all gun sales to go through a background check, this is different than making up some claim of a loophole to deceive people. I am a firm believer that when someone starts lying to me about a proposed law, the target must be something other than what he is saying. In this case, there are two possible targets. The first is to stop the private individual from selling at all without going through a dealer. The second possibility is that they are trying to stop gun shows altogether, using this as a means to reduce the numbers of guns in the citizen's hands. Given the onerous requirements that keep getting proposed for the gun show promoter, I tend to lean towards the second with the first as a hoped for by-product.
But, there is no loophole like the Brady Bunch claims, and this makes anything they say suspect.