Posted on 03/15/2011 9:27:27 AM PDT by neverdem
A fundamental principle of a free people is the ability to transfer property to someone else without government intervention. In the case of firearms, it is often a tradition to pass on a gun from one generation to another.
Recently a group called Mayors Against Illegal Guns co-chaired by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, commissioned a poll to determine how the public felt about tightening background checks on people that bought guns. It will come as little surprise that a group called Mayors Against Illegal Guns wants additional restrictive legislation on the already restrictive process and they even bought the research that indicates the public agrees.
The target of liberal legislators is the gun show. If you are a licensed gun dealer you hold a Federal Firearms License and are required by law to perform a background check before you can release the gun to the buyer. That makes good sense and often there is a waiting period. A waiting period makes good sense too unless you are someone being threatened or harassed and you happen to need a way to defend yourself. The attacker will be reassured that the government will deny you, the potential victim, an immediate opportunity to purchase a tool to defend yourself. When an attack is going to happen in seconds the police, if called, will respond in minutes to take the crime report.
Here is the controversial aspect of a gun show: the unlicensed seller. This is a person that wants to sell his personal property to another individual. It is the equivalent of you saying “Mike, you want to sell that .22?” And then me telling you I’ll take 50-bucks for it. We have a deal and I’m the unlicensed seller. But, I don’t need a license to sell you my .22. That is the “gun show loophole.”
Closing the “gun show loophole” enables the government to curtail person to person sales. That is what is really behind the attack on gun shows. Every gun would have to be turned into a gun dealer so that it could be tracked by the Federal Government and then the transfer process would be monitored by the Federal Government. The right you have now to sell your neighbor your shotgun will be gone, forever.
What is even more disturbing is the loss of the right to pass on your gun to a family member. The tradition of passing on grandpa’s gun to his grandson will be legislated out of existence. Gramps will have to pass the gun to a federally authorized entity that will then register it and pass it on to the recipient. Often the gifting of the first firearm is to someone thirteen or fourteen years old. Because they can not legally own a gun at that age it would have to be transferred to someone who would then hold the gun until it could be then transferred to the final owner when legal age is reached. That’s a lot of red tape to give someone your squirrel rifle.
Anti-gun liberals know that more bureaucracy on law abiding citizens is the easiest form of gun control and hidden under the label of ‘common sense gun measures.” If the government can make criminals out of people that have never committed a criminal act with administrative measures then people will avoid buying, owning and transferring guns altogether. Then they accomplish what they set out to do; stop legal citizens from owning guns.
New York City has some of the toughest gun laws in the United States but they have not eliminated crimes committed with guns. Why? Because going after gang members is dangerous, expensive and more often than not the criminal ends up back on the street. Mayors Against Illegal Guns should take a closer look at those that are committing the crimes and focus on punishing the perpetrators rather than building a bureaucracy that is targeted at legal gun owners.
I remember when I was a teenager walking down the street with an Ithaca Model 37 pump 12 gauge in the rural Adirondack mountain town where I grew up. I had purchased the gun from a friend and there wasn’t any paperwork, background check, state or federal government involved. A police car pulled up next to me and the officer asked “Are you coming or going? I get off in a few minutes and if you want to go hunting together hop in and I’ll give you a ride.” It turns out I was walking home and after I told that to the officer, he just said “Ok then, next time” and drove off. To me, that officer exercised common sense gun control. An anti-gun liberal would have had me, the gun seller and probably the officer up on federal charges and locked us up for a long time. It’s a pity that the left doesn’t understand the relationship between gun ownership and crime but it will be a tragedy if we let the Bloomberg lead coalition erode the gun rights of a free people.
If we could ever safely do so, the Second Amendment needs to be cut in half so as to avoid ambiguity. In these times, it should just read “The Right of the People to keep and bear Arms shall NOT BE INFRINGED.” The emphasis should be written on paper as well, as a reminder to government.
Same here. I use to bring my 22 to school in a backpack so I could hunt squirrels and rabbits after school.
Bear in mind that that this is yet ANOTHER “commonsense” Disarmament initiative designed to be the foundation for a Registration system.
Once they fooled enough people to once again go along with such a measure they will simply collect sales information in a database and Hello! Gun Registration database.
As soon as they’ve achieved this, all they need is another excuse to require people to register their guns that may not be in the database and confirm the information already in the database.
Meanwhile they will be subjecting people to yet another bureaucratic hoop to jump though for mere gun ownership in their ongoing quest to disarm the law-abiding.
In addition, never forget that if the government is granting you “Permission” to defend yourself, they can easily withdraw that permission and “Recall” your private property and have it melted down.
No, not stopped, just crushed under an infinitely heavy harness hooked up to whatever crackpot burden they dreamed up last night after seeing Michael Moore's latest dorkumentary, watching us crawl through life, thanking them for giving us such a light payload and demanding they place more weight on everyone else.
Always remember that they have limited resources,
and there is absolutely NO WAY they could get all the guns and gunowners in the “first wave”.
The second wave will be met with a hail of bullets.
Which is why they like to employ the divide and conquer strategy – only go after a small segment of the population each time.
Consider that while most people think that confiscation is the ultimate goal of the gun grabbers their holly grail has to be Federal control over all transfers.
Because once they have achieved that, and they can get enough people to “register” to be on the list, they will have an emergency confiscation mechanism in place.
They can short circuit the whole process and go straight to Confiscation – that is why they never stop trying to push this issue.
You are exactly correct. Legal private sales are the safety valve that prevents licensing of gun dealer from becoming a national registration system. Here is a good essay explaining that registration equals confiscation:
GUN REGISTRATION IS GUN CONFISCATION (old but good):
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2608785/posts
Question: What’s to stop them from trying to make the Federal purview over private transactions retroactive?
Parenthetically, what’s to prevent the government from ordering that ALL previous transactions to be run through the NICS system?
IF they could get that sort of thing passed somehow, people would only have two choices: Either submit (in more ways than one) your old information, effectively registering your weapons that were previously off the radar screen.
OR, you automatically become a lawbreaker.
{Yes, I know I may have given the Marxists a new idea, but you can bet dollars to donuts they have thought of it themselves}
“Every gun would have to be turned into a gun dealer so that it could be tracked by the Federal Government and then the transfer process would be monitored by the Federal Government. The right you have now to sell your neighbor your shotgun will be gone, forever.”
I suspect the compliance rate with this, particularly here in Montana, would be rather low.
You are correct, but it would not matter much. The key is to make unregistered possession illegal. It makes transfer of the “gun culture” much more difficult and provides a lever to create lots of new “criminals” who can be forced to do what the government wants, one at a time.
You stand up against the new laws against government ownership of all food animals? The Feds simply find a snitch that says you have an unregistered firearm, and they raid your farm and destroy your livelihood. Of course, if they wish, they can always find a convenient unregistered firearm.
Re: “We brought rifles to school because we hunted before the day began.”
Me too: I once borrowed the high school principal’s car to go home during lunch and get my shotgun [and leave it in the trunk of his car till school was out] so I could go hunting with several other students and one of the teachers after school. His only warning to me was, “Don’t forget to give me my keys back before you leave to go hunting!”
Re: “We brought rifles to school because we hunted before the day began.”
Me too: I once borrowed the high school principal’s car to go home during lunch and get my shotgun [and leave it in the trunk of his car till school was out] so I could go hunting with several other students and one of the teachers after school. His only warning to me was, “Don’t forget to give me my keys back before you leave to go hunting!”
Re: “We brought rifles to school because we hunted before the day began.”
Me too: I once borrowed the high school principal’s car to go home during lunch and get my shotgun [and leave it in the trunk of his car till school was out] so I could go hunting with several other students and one of the teachers after school. His only warning to me was, “Don’t forget to give me my keys back before you leave to go hunting!”
Oops - sorry about the multiple post — thought my computer wasn’t responding....
To even come up with such an idea I would presume that you reside in the NorthEast. That’s not something an Independent thinking Westerner would think of.
Having studied the enemy (oh no! how could you use such a word) I have a fair idea how they think.
Hopefully I didn’t give them any ideas they wouldn’t have developed on their own.
That one would most likely be unconstitutional, but hey what do they do that actually is constitutional?
There has never been and there will never be a free socialist society.
Perhaps somebody could tell them folks what to expect when you back a man into a corner. No, we’re not liberals so we won’t get down on our knees. We’re more than likely going to come out swinging and if they squeeze too tight we’ll come out shootin.
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