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.
I've heard a lot of terrible takes when it comes to the gun control debate. But this might be the first well thought out proposal I've heard.
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.
And how is the government going to know you handed them the gun?
The guns go to an FFL for storage. And if you can't keep track of your guns then they should absolutely be removed from you. Get a paint marker if you need to. It's what the Army does.
What public safety concern are you mitigating in any of the scenarios I described? What impediments to public safety are you creating when you impose your mandates?
How do the guns get to the FFL? If I take them, the transfer has already occurred. The only available method with a "universal" system is for my neighbor to take them himself.
Yes, that's the idea. If your neighbor wants to give you guns, they take them to an FFL and then you pick them up after the FFL runs your background check. Or the FFL can just store them. At no point should guns transfer between people without a record that is permanently kept.
And the problem with what you're suggesting is if you give your guns to Billy Bob the terrorist, and he never tells anyone where he got them from then you aren't even getting a knock at the door. There's not even a case for you to defend yourself in. If you happen to have a particularly new gun which still has records then you can just say you "lost it" which is another loophole we need to fix. Losing a gun needs to be a crime that results in forfeiting the right to own guns.
This blasé attitude about guns for the sake of preventing a hypothetical tyrannical crack down needs to die and never be brought back.
Do me a favor and run your little plan by a mental health professional, a social worker, a paramedic, a 14-year-old babysitter... The moment you left those guns in the hands of my emotionally distraught neighbor for even a second after he asked for help, you lost this particular argument.
There are decent arguments for a UBC; you're not making them. You should be focusing on what few public safety benefits would actually arise. You should be drawing attention away from the myriad administrative clusterfuck issues where UBCs fail, and toward those few scenarios where UBCs would actually benefit public safety. You should be conceding that "Universal" is completely impractical. You should be pointing out that none of the proposed "U"BC plans have ever actually been truly "U", and that all of them have included broad exceptions in a (piss-poor) attempt to avoid many of the problems I've described.
No. If they want to surrender their firearms they can do so to an FFL or a police station. I'm very familiar with mental health stuff and having access to the guns in any way shape or form is extremely dangerous. That includes at places you frequent. The option is not, you taking them or nothing. Load them all in your car with your buddy and drive down to the local range. Arrange for storage there and leave them in the storage.
If you want to have guns you have to have the responsibility too. Kid time with the deadly weapons is over.
No, you don't get to make that argument. Not after you try to make me a criminal for trying to take such responsibility. You're continuing to make the same mistakes. Argue better.
You're not a criminal for doing that under the current laws. And I straight up gave you the answer to the quiz for when it happens under UBC. You're just trying to be outraged at this point.
Outraged? Nah. Bored. After you murdered your own argument, I've got nothing left to do but play sudoku, jerk off, and fall asleep.
Sure, and yet, here you are.
Also, why can't you just take your friend, friend's guns, in your car, to the range, store them there? is there any real problem with that, or any real reason why you specifically need to have the guns rather than the range, which might be a better long term storage solution? I'm not opposed to your solution, I think it's workable, I think it has potential to, maybe not get passed federally since the gun lobby is insanely powerful, but maybe work on a state-by-state basis, right, and build up from there. But if you do have an actual counterargument for what the guy's saying, then you should give it instead of just kind of deflecting, because right now he does seem to have basically refuted all of the hypotheticals you were able to give about why requiring some kind of record every time a gun is transferred is a bad idea, and why universal background checks and the state as an active third party rather than a retroactive third party might be a good idea.
The only counterargument I can really see against it is maybe that it would result in state overreach or people being prevented from having access to guns if we start to see disproportionate enforcement of crimes and certain crimes being reclassified as felonies or something, but that's also a problem with the current system that wouldn't really get solved by your proposal at all, so yeah, I dunno.