On Thu, 18 Apr 2013 15:17:04 -0500, "Pete C."
wrote:


Ed Huntress wrote:



The point is that background checks, where they're required for
private sales (six states), will disallow anyone who doesn't pass
NICS.

Private sales are private and no background check law will stop, or even
hinder someone who is going to do an illegal transfer.

Uh, Pete, we have a failure to communicate here.

If you have a background check system, you know if the seller made a
legal sale. If someone else has the gun and there's no record of it
being background-checked before the sale, you have a strawman seller.
You can put him in jail and make the strawman-purchase business very
risky and costly.

The only other thing you need is a requirement that thefts be reported
in a very short time. Some states already have that.


Straw purchases are felonies, not legal purchases as are thefts and no
background check has any relevance.

You miss the point. A straw purchase looks like a legal purchase under
the law, until the straw purchaser sells the gun to a criminal or
mental defective, and the straw purchaser knows the buyer was
unqualified. In most states now, there's no way to prove that he knew
it. He can go right on with his straw-purchasing business.

If a straw purchaser/seller sells the gun -- which is the point of
being in the straw-purchase business to begin with -- he should have
to run a background check on the buyer. Then he can't get away with
saying "Gee, the guy said he wasn't a prohibited buyer." Which, of
course, ends any possible prosecution, unless the prosecutor is
unusually lucky and has lots of other evidence. And that's rare. Straw
purchasing is a pretty safe business as the laws stand in most states
now.

If someone is making a felony straw purchase, they aren't going to do
any background check on the person they are transferring the gun to.

I think you misunderstand what straw purchases are about. A strawman
purchaser is someone with a clean record who buys guns from legit
dealers and then sells them to someone who shouldn't have them. If you
sell a gun without a background check, and the gun is recovered in a
crime or even an unlawful possession, you, the straw purchaser, are up
the river.

Without a background check it's just your word against the criminal.
And you're the one with the clean record.

Your argument is total nonsense claiming that a new law will stop people
from doing something that is already illegal.

Your argument shows a complete lack of thinking, or of understanding
what straw purchases are and how they work. The idea is to catch the
straw purchaser making an illegal sale. Where background checks are
required, and there is no record in an FFL's Bound Book that you made
one, you're in deep ****.



This is no different than the illegal sales of prescription drugs. The
buyer may well "pass the background check" with a valid prescription,
however their sale to a third party is already illegal, and making up
some law that states a private sale of prescription drugs which is
already illegal requires the buyer to have a prescription is absurd.

If there was a way to identify the drugs, like the serial number on a
gun, the original purchaser would be in jail. Just like a strawman gun
purchaser who failed to get a background check on his buyer.

Are we starting to communicate yet?

--
Ed Huntress