When illegal guns flood our streets, precious lives are lost and communities are destroyed.
*** So then the opposite must also be true, RE: legal guns, right Quigley? ***
Quigley is a bonehead. Then again he's a democrat, so I repeat myself.
If you a are a "Gun Dealer", you MUST be licensed by the BATF, period. What he's talking about is Private Sales among Private Individuals, that's what he wants to stop. But even then, as we in IL know if you sell to someone who doesn't have a Valid FOID Card YOU can go to jail. And NO law abiding citizen is going to take that risk.
Which means he's really talking about Criminals. Who ignore the law(s) to begin with. So One, or a Dozen more 'sensible' Gun Laws, won't make a dime's worth of difference to a criminal.
Both are inanimate objects, have no brain, and cannot think for themselves. They are just dumb 'machines'. It is the person at the control who may do something 'illegal' with that dumb machine. The machine has no control over the operator.
He may as well argue that by making inexpensive Laptops or Desktop PC's available for everyone they will increase Home Burglary rates(1).
And speaking of that. I'd bet thee rent that the number of Home Break-ins I hear on the scanner every weekend will DECREASE. Now it's like they wait for the homeowner to go shopping, not caring if one person is still there and break in, and then scoot before they get back. But now they won't know if that lone someone is ARMED.
(1) One thing cheap computers HAVEN'T done is improve peoples spelling :-)
If we go 'back in history', like 1967, guns (Firearms) were EVERYWHERE in Chicago. Yet there weren't any 'bloodbaths'. Sears had them right there in the Sporting Goods Dept, no locks, no chains, no cases. Just pick em up and check em out. And the local Sports Store Sold them too. 'Heck' I was buying boxes of .22 Shorts ($.25 a box iirc) from the Local Sports Store when I was about 14-15 -- no questions asked. And every other household had some type of Firearm and again, no bloodbaths. And we didn't 'go for the gun' after we'd get in a fist fight. You won or lost and that was that.
Soooooo. All things being equal, what has really changed in Chicago, or any big city, from 'way back then' to today that makes it so 'dangerous' for people to have ready access to a firearm???? Hmmmmm, that's a toughie.
Wait! Watson I have it! Demographics!
Ooops I've committed a 'PC Sin'. I just called, 'a spade a spade'. Oh well, I can deal with it :-)
Further evidence that our urban areas are regressing to tribalism.