On Sun, 03 Feb 2013 09:39:50 +0700, John B.
wrote:

On Sat, 02 Feb 2013 16:06:52 -0500, Ed Huntress
wrote:

On Sat, 02 Feb 2013 19:18:40 +0700, John B.
wrote:

On Sat, 2 Feb 2013 04:16:38 -0500, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:



"John B." wrote in message
news
On Fri, 1 Feb 2013 16:46:36 -0500, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:



"Delvin Benet" wrote in message
news:aeaba$510c1ac0$414e828e$15417@EVERESTKC. NET...

On 2/1/2013 10:56 AM, rangerssuck wrote:
On Friday, February 1, 2013 1:07:18 PM UTC-5, Delvin Benet wrote:
On 2/1/2013 6:14 AM, rangerssuck wrote:

On Friday, February 1, 2013 2:06:08 AM UTC-5, Delvin Benet wrote:


snip


Laws should be passed ONLY if they have some logical connection with the

goal to be achieved. Gun registration has *no* connection with

preventing gun violence. It doesn't even serve a useful purpose for

trying to capture and prosecute people who commit gun crimes.

Gun registration would help to achieve those goals by making it more
difficult for criminals to get the guns that they use to commit the
crimes.

No, it wouldn't make it more difficult in the least. A criminal who
steals a gun doesn't know, nor care, if that gun is registered or not.
And registration doesn't prevent, deter or discourage a criminal from
buying a gun. A background check might help there, but not registration.

============================================= =========================
(EH)

Registration is about restricting the transfer of guns from legal
purchasers
to criminals. If you have registration and a good database, and a criminal
is picked up in possession of a gun, you first get the criminal on the
possession charge, even if he didn't use it to commit a crime. Then you've
got him on a possession of *stolen property* charge. Depending on how he
pleads, you may also get him on a burglary or other theft charge. Or, you
have him on an illegal purchase charge. Depending on the state, all of
these
are usually felonies.

In addition, you have the last legal owner on a charge of illegal sale or
failing to report a gun theft -- again, depending on the state. And if the
first retail buyer wasn't really legal, you have HIM on an illegal
purchase,
and the retail seller, probably, on an illegal sale.

That's a lot of jail time. That's a pretty good deterrent at each end of
the
transaction(s).

And there is much, much more that can be done to dry up criminal sales if
registration is followed up with some good laws. Gun nutz frequently refer
to gun laws in Switzerland and Israel as "good" examples. Here are some
follow-up laws those countries use to make it hard for criminals to get
guns.

In Switzerland, if your gun is stolen, you have 24 hours to report it. No
exceptions, no excuses. You're expected to be in constant control of your
guns. If you fail to do so, there is a heavy fine.

In Israel, almost any Israeli can get a gun, even BORROWING THEM FROM THE
POLICE!, for chrissake. Great law, huh? Here's the rest of it: If you fail
to get a license (with registration), and you're found in possession of a
gun, it's one year or two years of mandatory jail time, depending on the
circumstances. No parole. No early outs. So you have to get through the
license check and registration of the gun.

If your gun is lost or stolen, it's an automatic misdemeanor with a
substantial fine. No excuses. It doesn't matter if you report it right
away,
because losing your gun or having your gun stolen is considered a prima
facie case that you "negligently failed to maintain control" of your gun.
If
it's stolen from your home, you're guilty of a crime. If it's stolen from
your car or your person, you're guilty of a crime.

If these laws were universal in the US, former NRA Board member Sanford
Abrams would be in prison now for "losing" 650 guns from his gun store in
Parkville, Maryland.

Switzerland and Israel can enjoy easy access and fairly open possession and
carrying of guns because they don't have crazy laws, like ours, that
practically invite illegal transfer of guns to criminals. They have tough,
tough penalties for any transgressions. Responsibility, including legal
methods for transfer of possession, and requirements to secure possession
of
guns you own, are part of their culture and their laws. Our gun nutz deny
responsibility because they have "rights," not responsibilities. With the
support of the NRA, they gut or resist our responsibility requirements on a
frequent basis, as part of a campaign of lunacy. They want to be able to
shoot Congressmen if they decide they're "tyrants," and they don't want
anybody to know that they have the means to do so.

That's the difference. That's why our lack of registration and the enabling
laws to discourage illicit transfer of guns results in a vast criminal
market of guns, and it's a large part of our culture and our outrageous
rates of gun crimes.

Are you catching on yet? You keep repeating your silly mantra that
"criminals don't care if their guns are registered," missing the point that
the purpose is to keep those guns out of criminal hands with a sensible
system of deterrents.

Maybe you should run for the NRA Board. You'd fit right in. d8-)

============================================== ===============
(JB)

It all sounds like a good idea although it historically just has not
worked in America.

The Sullivan law was enacted in 1911 with the intent of keeping
concealable guns out of the hands of various nefarious people. History
has shown its success.... It is still in effect I believe and after
101 years there are obviously no guns in the hands of criminals in New
York.

============================================== ===============
(EH)

The Sullivan Act was not about tracking and choking off criminal sources of
guns. It was about keeping the Tammany Hall politicians' pet thugs and
gangsters under political control. US homicides spiked to 3 TIMES their
previous rate in just a few years after 1905 (to roughly twice what it is
now), and 10% of them were in NYC -- which had less than 5% of the US
population. The public, and gangsters, were screaming for gun control.
Ordinary people were shooting back at the gangsters, and they were furious
about it. d8-)

The central trouble with the Act, as with much of gun control in the US, was
that it was local, and thus ineffective. If a criminal decided that the risk
of being caught with an illegal gun was outweighed by the advantages of
carrying one, he could hop on a train at 39th St. and be in a Harrison, NJ
gun store in less than 20 minutes, where he could buy anything he wanted.
Thus, the homicide rate remained high.

Note that nothing I've suggested involves prohibitions. In fact, as the
examples of Switzerland and Israel demonstrate, it's possible to have an
advanced society in which guns are widely available and part of the national
culture, without the crime problem. It appears to relate first to the types
of gun laws a country has and to the gun-owning culture that results from
living within those laws. (I lived in Switzerland for 10 months and shot
with my friends there on Sundays. The culture is completely different, and
the ubiquity of target shooting and practice exceeds what we have here.)
Our laws are a crazy quilt of outright prohibitions and free-for-alls
(private sales without background checks, and limited registration), which
has produced a similarly crazy response. As one who has owned guns since
1959, I've watched the evolution of gun-owning culture in the US. In my
opinion, a significant fraction of it has become neurotic. I first
encountered the gun nutz, as I call them, on commercial pistol ranges in the
1980s. They gave me the creeps.

We have a lot of them here and they still give me the creeps. They're mostly
ignorant of history and incapable of clear-headed thinking. They have
stupidly converted Jefferson's and Washington's defense against tyranny,
which they saw as the usurpation of democratic rule, with a right to shoot
politicians who won fair elections but who they don't like. They are mildly
insane, IMO. And they're the noisiest gun advocates in the current debate.

============================================== ================
(JB)

In 1919 the Volstead Act was passed which eliminated the recreational
use of alcohol in the United states. another exciting success of law
over nature.

Of course murder, thievery, and numerous other anti social acts are
also "against the law" and as we all know, crime in the United states
is virtually non-existent.

One the other hand, New Hampshire, with nearly non-existent gun laws
has (I believe) the lowest gun crime/accident rate in the U.S.

============================================== ================
(EH)

My family is from NH, and I can testify that the culture there might as well
be in a different country from New York City or New Jersey. You can't
validly draw many comparisons.

All three of the upper New England states -- NH, Maine, and Vermont -- have
lax gun laws and very low violent crime rates. (Interestingly, NH's property
crime rate is higher than that of NJ, but that's another discussion). That's
always been the case, even a century ago, when there were few gun laws in
any state.

So it's obvious that the low violent crime rates came first, and that
allowed lax gun laws. To confirm the lack of cause-and-effect of gun laws to
crime, compare NH with some southern states that have fairly lax gun laws
but high murder and other violent crime rates. You see the opposite
apparent relationship. But it's an illusion, IMO. There is no causative
relationship either way, based on the evidence.

That's been backed up by years of studying FBI/UCR data, when I was active
in pro-gun politics, back in the early '90s. To paraphrase economist Milton
Friedman, violent crime is always and everywhere a cultural phenomenon.
Whether we can modify that culture through law is an open question; the
evidence is mixed. It hasn't been effective in terms of gun laws, but, as I
said, our gun laws are a crazy quilt of mostly local laws that are
inherently ineffective because they are easy to circumvent.

Regarding liquor prohibition, it was the wrong remedy for another cultural
problem. (There have been studies that suggest it *did* break a cultural
cycle of destructive habitual drinking, which never returned to anything
like the pre-1930 extent, but that, too, is another discussion.) In general,
prohibitions in the face of demand are a lost cause. Regarding gun control,
as I've shown and as the examples from other countries demonstrate, breaking
the flow of guns to criminals appears to be far more effective, both in
terms of crime and culture, than prohibiting gun ownership. If you do it
right, you can have a lot of guns in a society with few consequential
problems.

--
Ed Huntress

(Ed, I wish you would buy, beg, borrow, a decent Usenet client. Your
posts are rather difficult to read :-)

There, is that better? I borrowed a copy of Agent for a couple of
days. I couldn't find my old one. 'Hope I'm not screwing it up.


Much better.... You can still (I believe) get a free copy of Agent. It
comes without the spelling checker though (although one would hope
that an ex-editor could spell :-)

You are either missing the boat or I'm being too obscure. My point is
that passing laws, regardless of whether gun control or fishing laws,
is not a solution, it is more likely a knee jerk reaction by a
politician to be seen to be doing something.

Some laws are knee-jerk. Some are solutions. Many are political
expedients, like creating a vast system for background checks and then
excepting private sales. That should be in a fourth category,
actually: call it "insanity."


While you rationalized the Volstead act never the less there was a
federal law?act? passed that banned alcohol from American soil (to be
poetic) and it didn't work; the Sullivan Law did effectively severely
limit the legal ownership of pistols in New York, and it didn't
decrease crime.

Not all laws work. See above.

EXACTLY!


I'm sure that you are old enough to remember "zip guns", home made
guns that are certainly capable of killing someone. Illegal in New
York where, I believe, they were rather common during their heyday.

My dad, a Sears store manager at the time, disarmed a kid with one,
who was trying to stick up the sporting goods departement at his
store. That was in 1955, in Trenton, NJ.

It was made from a piece of thin aluminum TV antenna tubing. My dad
said he should have let the kid shoot it. It would have solved the
problem. g


In short, you can't make a law and do away with something people
either want or do not see as a crime.... the war on illegal gambling
comes to mind. Even the cops used to get a dollar down on the numbers
every week :-)

If there's a demand for something, you aren't likely to shut it down
with prohibitions, we agree. But sometimes you can, or nearly so.

As in ?

DDT. Open exhaust systems on hot cars. Coca-Cola -- the original, with
cocaine. g


I don't advocate any gun prohibitions, although I wouldn't give a
flying fig if they outlawed new sales of ARs and 30-round magazines. I
won't get excited about that one either way it goes. I wonder where
gun culture would be today if the 1994 prohibition had been a lot
tougher, and if Congress had renewed it. Who knows?

My major argument to gun legislation is that they are impinging on MY
liberty.

Keep this in mind: All but a small number of the guns that wind up in
criminal hands were originally bought by lawful citizens.

You may be perfectly responsible. But the next guy is not.

To my personal knowledge my family has owned firearms since
the 1890's and very likely far longer...

Mine fought in Queen Anne's War, 1702. d8-)

...and not a one of us has ever
committed a crime (well other then shooting deer out of season :-)
with a firearm.

See above.



But worse, in my opinion, gun control or lack thereof appears to have
become nearly a religious issue. I hear people say that they are
afraid of guns, wouldn't have them in the house, and on and on, but it
really is a truism that guns don't kill people, people kill people.

People with guns are so much more effective, though. g That's what
the evidence and statistics tell us.

Of course they are more effective, after all they have been under
development for several hundred years, they ought to be pretty
effective.

Furthermore, they were invented for the purpose of killing people. All
of that development has only made them better.

Witness the latest incarnations. Damned efficient, they are. You can
shoot up a whole classroom full of kids with one in a minute or two.
That's productivity!


But for sheer volume, nothing to date has equaled the good old
automobile. I just did a search on "Deaths due to Automobile
Accidents" and "killed by firearms every year". The numbers were
42,836 for Autos and 8,306 by firearms. That is some 500% going for
the Cars..... and they are registered and the drivers are all
certified competent.

Let me ask you some questions at a comparable level of mature
sensibility:

If you want to kill somebody in his third-floor apartment, which would
you choose, a gun or a car?

If you want to go to church on Sunday, and it's five miles away, which
would you do: hop in your car and drive there, or grab your Glock and
start shooting?

One mo Why does "going postal" not refer to mowing people down with
a mail truck?

These are not intended to merit serious responses, anymore than your
car/gun equivalency merits a serious response. You know the answer.
Rhetorical questions and statements conducted at something below the
maturity level of a high school freshman are not very effective.


As for kids (the latest firearm furor) there were, in the United
States, an average of 6 children 0-14 years old were killed and 694
injured every day in motor vehicle crashes during 2003. Given that
there have been something like 200 killed in school shootings in the
past 15 years it begins to look like a pretty small number when you
compare it to car "accidents".

See above. You know the answer. If not, talk to the parents and
friends of some of the kids killed in those school shootings.


If you don't know how to handle guns and if you've never had any
exposure to them, it's reasonable to be afraid of them. Hell, I'M
afraid when people like that get a gun in their hands.

But to be afraid of the mechanical device called a gun and to be
"afraid to have one in the house"? After all historically knives such
as practically everyone has in the kitchen have killed far more then
all the guns ever manufactured. A common Chef's Knife would have been
a very desirable weapon during much of man's history.

Not now, buddy. We've got Bushmasters! Screw the knives.

Besides, pulling the trigger on a knife and having it fly across the
room and kill someone is very unlikely. "Oops" with a knife usually
means a cut finger at worst.



I'm not going to get started on the Modern Gun Enthusiast as they are
pretty strange people.

You can say that again.

After viewing a couple of youtube films I think
that a six or eight foot string of firecrackers would make a suitable
substitute for most of them. They make a lot of smoke and noise and
don't punch holes in anything :-)

Firecrackers good. I'd like to see them play chicken with M80s, seeing
how long they can hold a lit one before they chicken out. With their
shooting hand.

I read about people toting cases of ammo to the range? When I was
shooting on an A.F. pistol team I used to shoot a National Match
course, 30 rounds, three evenings a week and probably two guns - say
another 90 - 100 rounds on Sunday.

--
Ed Huntress