Gun-Ownership Qualification

[ChasHam]

There's clear societal benefit to preventing individuals who are likely to misuse firearms from owning one. That's why a first-time gun buyer needs to clear all those qualification hurdles.

But what benefit is there to investigating a person for his second or subsequent purchase? If he was going to do wrong with a gun-- he's already got one!

Heck, if you can show the guy behind the gun shop counter your well-maintained trusty old whatever, all you should need to buy another gun is your American Express card!

[Aguila Blanca]

Originally Posted by ChasHam

There's clear societal benefit to preventing individuals who are likely to misuse firearms from owning one. That's why a first-time gun buyer needs to clear all those qualification hurdles.

This sounds suspiciously like what the courts refer to as "interest balancing," which is not supposed to apply to the fundamental rights guaranteed to us by the Bill of Rights in the Constitution.

Once you establish a system to "prevent individuals who are likely to misuse firearms" from owning them, you have a system that is ripe for abuse. Who decides who is and who isn't "likely" to misuse a firearm? What qualifications do the deciders have? What are the specific determining factors to be used in making the determination? If someone is turned down once, at an early age, is he/she barred for life even if the rejection was due to a temporary situation that was years ago?

I am not willing to accept that your opening statement is in synch with the intent of the 2nd Amendment.

[44 AMP]

There's clear societal benefit to preventing individuals who are likely to misuse firearms from owning one.

Of course! but there is also this...
There's clear societal benefit to preventing individuals with defective genes from reproducing.

There's clear societal benefit to..... (insert your favorite cause here)...

There's clear societal benefit to....removing the untermenschen from our society...

of course, I skipped a lot, but this is where it winds up, whomever is the ruling class decides what "societal benefits" are needful, and what methods are to be used to carry them out.

Some of the most extreme "benefits to society" we disallow, on moral or ethical, and occasionally legal grounds.

We have fought wars, spend billions upon billions of dollars and more importantly millions upon millions of lives to prevent some one else's vison of what is beneficial to society from being forced upon us.

Sure, it is beneficial to society to keep those intent on doing harm from the means to do so. Fine. Now, HOW do you that??

And, more importantly, how do you do that without stomping on the rights of EVERYONE who is not "intent on doing harm"? You can't.

The best we can do, and what we have historically done is to punish those who COMMIT harm. In other words we cannot, and should not act on what we THINK their intentions are, absent an overt act proving their intent.

Unfortunately that isn't how gun control laws work. And that it the main reason so many of us are so put out with them. Guilty until "proven" innocent. Not the way the rest of our system works and its not the way we have all been taught our system is supposed to work.

Which is a point I have made often before, according to what we are all told, that gun control (background checks and all the rest) is to prevent people who shouldn't have weapons from having weapons. But the only way to do that is to prevent ALL people from having weapons, and that itself doesn't do anything other than reduce us all to the rule of the law of the jungle.

So, yes, I agree that any background check on a person who already has a gun is barking stupid, according to the stated purpose of the laws.

[ChasHam]

Originally Posted by Aguila Blanca

I am not willing to accept that your opening statement is in synch with the intent of the 2nd Amendment.

You've locked onto my intro comment and I understand what you're saying.

But you seem to have missed the key point of the post-- that background investigations for second and subsequent firearm purchases make no sense.

They create pointless bureaucratic delay, cost a lot of money, tie up law enforcement resources better deployed elsewhere, slow the commercial process and arguably interfere with people's rights....yet do nothing to protect the public.

[Aguila Blanca]

Originally Posted by ChasHam

You've locked onto my intro comment and I understand what you're saying.

But you seem to have missed the key point of the post-- that background investigations for second and subsequent firearm purchases make no sense.

I didn't miss it.

With all due respect, what you refer to as the "key point" rests on the opening statement. If the opening statement is fallacious, then anything that grows out of it or derives from it is fallacious.

We know how easy it is to buy guns on the street. Without a background check, how is an FFL supposed to know if the "well-maintained trusty old whatever" you show him was bought legally or if you bought it from sumdood behind the barber shop at 02:00 in the morning?

[Double Naught Spy]

There's clear societal benefit to preventing individuals who are likely to misuse firearms from owning one. That's why a first-time gun buyer needs to clear all those qualification hurdles.

But what benefit is there to investigating a person for his second or subsequent purchase? If he was going to do wrong with a gun-- he's already got one!

Heck, if you can show the guy behind the gun shop counter your well-maintained trusty old whatever, all you should need to buy another gun is your American Express card!

Just because you were legal to buy a gun last year does not mean that you are legal to buy a gun this year. That is why they do the checks. Showing the guy behind the counter that you have a gun is not proof that you are still legal to have it, as evidenced by all the cons who commit subsequent crimes.

[USNRet93]

How is the background check, as it exists today, going to predict those "who are likely to misuse firearms"?
A felon is NOT automatically "likely to misuse a firearm", particularly for some felony convictions(white collar crime, as an example). A fine upstanding citizen is often the person who "misused a firearm"..see the thread abut the dentist's husband who started a gun fight and got shot.

If the BG check is going to be used as a predictor of miuse of a firearm, it would have to change, a lot(and cost a whole bunch more)..

[Aguila Blanca]

Originally Posted by USNRet93

A fine upstanding citizen is often the person who "misused a firearm"..see the thread abut the dentist's husband who started a gun fight and got shot.

Your general point is valid, but I respectfully submit that using the dentist and her husband as examples of "fine upstanding citizens" is relying on a fact not in evidence. Fine upstanding citizens don't go hunting for people who point out that you're a lousy driver.

[USNRet93]

Originally Posted by Aguila Blanca

Your general point is valid, but I respectfully submit that using the dentist and her husband as examples of "fine upstanding citizens" is relying on a fact not in evidence. Fine upstanding citizens don't go hunting for people who point out that you're a lousy driver.

BUT that guy successfully passed the BG check as it exists today..My point is the BG check is NOT a predictor of anything but that the person who passed it probably is gonna buy a gun..

[Double Naught Spy]

How is the background check, as it exists today, going to predict those "who are likely to misuse firearms"?

It is not a prediction tool and was never meant to be one. All it does is verify that you are legally able to own the firearm you wish to be purchasing, that you have not done anything that would disqualify you from legal ownership.

A fine upstanding citizen is often the person who "misused a firearm"..see the thread abut the dentist's husband who started a gun fight and got shot.

Everybody is legally a fine, upstanding citizen until they get caught and convicted of breaking the law.

[stonewall50]

Originally Posted by ChasHam

There's clear societal benefit to preventing individuals who are likely to misuse firearms from owning one. That's why a first-time gun buyer needs to clear all those qualification hurdles.



But what benefit is there to investigating a person for his second or subsequent purchase? If he was going to do wrong with a gun-- he's already got one!



Heck, if you can show the guy behind the gun shop counter your well-maintained trusty old whatever, all you should need to buy another gun is your American Express card!

Here is a fun fact...

Hate speech laws in places like the UK are now being used to prosecute more left leaning individuals who wanted them imposed in the first place. Which is irony if I’ve ever heard it. This is what I know about the government. NEVER vote for them to have more power or more money. Once you give it to them...you will NOT get it back. Period. The government loves to do things like spend every cent in their budget to request more money the next fiscal year. Could you imagine if a private company did that?

My point? If the societal benefit is to keep guns out of the hands of the unfit...let’s find out who is unfit. Due process matters. If I can’t trust you to hold a gun? I don’t want you out and about in free society anyway. If you can’t grasp the PAINFULLY simple concept that MURDER IS WRONG? Why should you be walking free?


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[Glenn E. Meyer]

A mass diagnostic run through the entire US population to decide who gets locked up?

Come on, now. This is going off the rails.

BTW, before the close, in the years before the Civil War, some Southern states had laws against speech and print that attacked slavery. So much for the 1st Amendment, for them.

Closed as we are not saying anything useful.