And antis argue that the way to fix that "loophole" is to (besides requiring an FFL and NICS to process every private transaction) to make it a criminal offense to fail to report a stolen firearm to the police. Well, the only way that particular "loophole" can be made relevant and enforceable is to require that the police know about all of your guns, and the only way to fix that "loophole" is to require universal registration. And the only way to implement universal registration is to fix another "loophole" by mandating zero grandfathering of currently owned firearms, so that all previously purchased firearms are accounted for in the national registry. And the only way to enforce the addition of privately owned firearms to the national registry is to pass a law temporarily suspending the 4th Amendment and conducting involuntary door to door searches to account for those firearms. Then that "suspension of the 4th" law will be used as a precedent so that all homes can be swept for any other kind of projectile weapon such as compound bows and crossbows (sportsmen and hunters will be allowed to keep their old long-bows, but they can only have 3 arrows in the home). And finally, that law will be used to justify the installation of video monitoring equipment in each home, linked to Fusion Centers, to make sure that you don't have any steak knives with pointy tips.JALLEN wrote:Like almost all proposals aimed at "doing something," this one doesn't seem to promise any real effectiveness.
This law won't stop "some dude" who stole my pistol from selling it to the perp who got caught with it, having bought it for $200, no background check, no paperwork, no ten day wait, probably not even a cancelled check. The perp was good and ineligible, underaged, a prison record already. They weren't going to use an FFL, NICS or any other formality, and don't give a flip what the Legislature wants, Congress wants or anything else.
This and similar transactions, the ones we really do want to stop, will go on unimpeded, while some otherwise lawful transfers will be stopped.
I agree with RoyGBiv that this may be the best deal we can get, but JALLEN is right, it won't stop even the adjudicated mentally unfit from getting a gun if they want one. Our rights aside, the only way to make sure that criminals and the insane don't get their hands on guns is to literally find and physically destroy every single gun on the planet. Even the militaries of the world cannot be allowed guns because individual personnel sometimes have a habit of parting out a gun as "damaged parts" and shipping them home in somebody's seabag (I myself own one gun which was acquired by my father in such a manner). As long as there is such a thing as a gun on planet earth, some of them will wind up in the hands of people who shouldn't have them, and some of them will wind up in the hands of good people who are sane enough to say "bag this! If bad and crazy people have guns, then I'm going to get one too—even if it's illegal—to protect me and mine from armed bad and crazy people."
No....there is only ONE way to make all this work, and that is to A) get government out of the business of regulating what we can or can't buy or what we are required to buy (health insurance, for instance); and B) get government out of the business of adjudicating sanity. The world is not without risk, and it is not, nor should it be, government's role to minimize or mitigate risk. Every layer of risk management and security that the government lays upon us is another step away from encouraging personal responsibility among the people.
Let the people be as armed as they want to be, and every real statistic and all the lessons of history say that crime will decline. There will always be crazy people. They existed in both the Old and New Testaments. And communities will simply have to be left alone to figure out how to deal with them equitably and mercifully without sacrificing the public safety; but the notion that there is a single federal standard, a "one size fits all" approach that will do it better at the local level than the locals themselves can do it is not only boneheaded and false, but it encourages local communities to abandon their responsibilities to their fellow citizens in a just and merciful manner.
This pending bill may be what we have to do to fend off the looters in our country, but it will only be temporary, and it will eventually be used as a stepping stone to further restrictions—because THAT is the political history of our nation. Each time the left wants something, it requires another incremental emasculation of the right. The left never gives an inch or compromises. Their general approach is always this: "We both have a right, but I don't exercise mine, so we're going to cut your right in half, and we'll call that a 'compromise.'" I don't blame the NRA for doing what it thinks is the least poisonous thing in defense of our RKBA (I am an Endowment Member and support NRA financially to the extent that I'm able), but this is not over with the passage of this bill.
The NRA is like the boy with his finger in the dike. He stops the leak, but there's no assistance from the water on the other side of the dike to stop the water pressure against that plug; and eventually another leak springs forth 3 feet way, and the boy reaches way over and sticks another finger in that leak. And pretty soon other leaks spring forth and the boy stretches out and plugs them with his toes, and now the water on the other side of the dike has the boy right where it wants him, spread-eagle and ready for gutting.
In the end, as a people we are going to live with one of two alternatives: universal disarmament, or revolution. Nobody in their right mind wants either alternative, but that is exactly where the excesses of the left are leading us. I'm not even convinced that bills like the one above will buy us any time, but I agree that the NONONONONONONO faction are not going to buy us any time either.
I'm depressed as heck about this stuff...........but don't tell the courts that I'm depressed about it or they'll take away my guns.
I was there. There simply weren't enough of us California voters who cared to stop that stuff. You can't blame it on the NRA. That would be an irrational accusation. That was entirely the fault of the neocoms in California government, and the dumbing down of California's educational system—now one of the very worst in the country, when it used to be among the very best.texanjoker wrote:NRA - where were they in the State of CA when they banned all sorts of stuff in the 90's?