On Wed, 11 Sep 2019 10:24:20 -0700 (PDT), trader_4
wrote:

On Wednesday, September 11, 2019 at 12:59:54 PM UTC-4, wrote:
On Wed, 11 Sep 2019 10:52:59 +0100, Bod wrote:

A growing number of people fear a mass shooting could take place in
their community, and an overwhelming majority support background checks
for gun sales, according to a new poll.


It is media inflicted mass hysteria. You really have a better chance
of getting hit by lightning than being killed by a mass shooter unless
you hang out on inner city drug corners late at night.
It is still unclear that background checks would have stopped any of
these shooters. Even the last guy is pretty shaky. We are still
waiting for the result of the raid and investigation but if he was an
illegal gun manufacturer, as the news portrays him, it is unlikely
that he would have gone to the police station to document the sale of
an illegal gun.

Part of the problem there is the law is somewhat vague on what exactly makes one
a gun dealer. Democrat candidate Pete B said he'd change it so that
anyone that sells 6 or more guns a year is a dealer. Sounds like a good
idea to me. Otherwise a guy like this guy could be selling 25 a year
and maintain that he's not making real money from it, that it's a hobby,
not a business motive, etc. But we don't know what exactly this guy
was doing. First good question is if it was just a gun transaction or
did he know the shooter before the sale. You really have to be a grade A
moron to be regularly dealing in guns without being licensed, unless
you're only selling them to people you really know. Otherwise you run
the real risk of selling one to a bad guy and then having the ATF and
FBI up your behind. I'd strongly suspect that once that happens, it's
likely that they are going to find something to try to bust you on.

The recurring word I see in the meager reporting on the Lubbock guy is
"manufacture" and in ATF speak that means making a receiver or other
serialized part. Of course you may not be able to trust the news to
get that right.
You can make your own gun from scratch but you can't sell it or give
it away without a manufacturer's license and assigning a serial number
to it that gets registered at ATF.