wrote in message ...

On Fri, 1 Feb 2013 16:46:36 -0500, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:



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-)


Ed, if someone steals your car and commits a crime or injures someone
with it, should you be charged with a crime?

================================================== ====

No, and the difference is self-evident.

================================================== ====

How about the axe in your woodshed? The knife in the kitchen?

================================================== ====

No, and the difference is self-evident.

================================================== ====

What do you propose to do about the guns already in criminals hands?

================================================== ====

Seize them when you can. 28% of guns seized in crimes are less than two
years old.

--
Ed Huntress

On Fri, 1 Feb 2013 16:46:36 -0500, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:



"Delvin Benet" wrote in message
. ..

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-)


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.

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.

--
Cheers,

John B.

On Friday, February 1, 2013 6:27:53 PM UTC-5, RogerN wrote:
"rangerssuck" wrote in message

...



On Friday, February 1, 2013 12:31:54 AM UTC-5, PrecisionmachinisT wrote:

"RogerN" wrote in message



snip

I don't think







snip







God doesn't think



Thanks. You gave me a laugh.



Libtard morons lies always make other libtard morons laugh.



RogerN

Dude, you are seriously humor-impaired.

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



"Delvin Benet" wrote in message
. ..

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


--
Cheers,

John B.

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
...

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 :-)

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.

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.

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.

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 :-)

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.

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

--
Cheers,

John B.

"Ed Huntress" wrote in message
...
(EH)

(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.

Ed Huntress

We just had another apparently senseless killing with a -knife- by a
man from gun-tolerant Vermont:
http://www.ldnews.com/national/ci_22...-stabbed-at-nh
"At this point in time there was no connection between the two, and it
was random,"
"Every indication I've been given is, frankly, that this is a random,
senseless attack,"

Something besides gun availability is making people kill randomly, or
drive into oncoming traffic.
The rabid, irrational gun haters who post here would be good
candidates for the MMPI test.
(Which I learned about from a doctor at a party, not from taking it.)

On Sat, 2 Feb 2013 08:47:58 -0500, "Jim Wilkins"
wrote:

"Ed Huntress" wrote in message
...
(EH)

(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.

Ed Huntress

We just had another apparently senseless killing with a -knife- by a
man from gun-tolerant Vermont:
http://www.ldnews.com/national/ci_22...-stabbed-at-nh
"At this point in time there was no connection between the two, and it
was random,"
"Every indication I've been given is, frankly, that this is a random,
senseless attack,"

Something besides gun availability is making people kill randomly, or
drive into oncoming traffic.
The rabid, irrational gun haters who post here would be good
candidates for the MMPI test.
(Which I learned about from a doctor at a party, not from taking it.)

Vermont had 8 homicides in 2011: 4 by firearms, and 2 by stabbing.
There isn't a lot of random anything in Vermont.

I doubt if there are twice as many guns as knives up there. They seem
to eat like civilized people

However, 51% of their homicides over the past 17 years were domestic
violence cases, and 58% of those victims were women. Maybe they're
lousy cooks and the husbands objected. One of those homicides was by
hanging. The wife couldn't make a decent Yankee potroast, maybe, but
hanging her for it seems a little extreme. d8-)

--
Ed Huntress

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
T...

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.


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.


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.

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?


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.

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.


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.

--
Ed Huntress

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
ET...

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 ?

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. To my personal knowledge my family has owned firearms since
the 1890's and very likely far longer and not a one of us has ever
committed a crime (well other then shooting deer out of season :-)
with a firearm.


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.

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.

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".

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.


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.
--
Cheers,

John B.

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

On Sat, 02 Feb 2013 23:23:51 -0500, Ed Huntress
wrote:

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.

Sure, ORIGINALLY. But how many hands did they pass thrugh before they
reached the criminal? But further to that I seem to remember reading
about criminals in the 1930's robbing National Guard Armories. and I
know for a fact, because I grew up with the guy what done it, that a
load of stollen hunting rifles were shipped to Cuba in the very early
days of the revolution. You can buy illegal trigger modifications for
assualt rifles. Yu can make a perfectly usible "shotgun" from two
pieces of tubing, a nail and a small block of steel. We've al;ready
mentioned the zip guns of yore. Certainly you can record the sale of
every legally sold firearm but I would argue that there will be, as
long as it is financially viable, an underground gun market catering
to those who are engaged in an activity where they do not wish to have
an identifiable weapon.

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


That is my point exactly. I'm responsible so you make me fill out all
kinds of forms and papers. The guy down the street takes his baseball
bat out for a walk and comes back with an unregistered pistol and two
loaded magazines.

I get the head ache and he gets the gun.

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.

It is very comforting to have a weapon upon which innumerable people
have spent so many years perfecting :-)

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!

Then you shoot yourself :-(

But lets be honest, it wasn't the gun that did it, the gun was laying
on some pawn shop shelf for a year or more, never shot a soul. It was
a twisted individual that did it and until you can somehow eradicate
these people there will probably always school killings. The last
Japanese school killing was done with a kitchen knife.

I do agree that having an assault rifle makes it a little easier but
the lack there of is not going to stop them. After all Timmy McVeigh
didn't have a gun.


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?

You are asking very slanted questions. In fairness I might well answer
that I'd wait until the guy starts off for work and sneak up behind
him with a ball bat.

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?

Hardly a logical question. Effectively you seem to be justifying some
40,000 deaths a year because you are too lazy to walk to church. Given
the overwhelming propensity for blubber that seems to have permeated
the American public I would have to say that the walk, whether at
glock point or not, would be of great benefit to the worshipers.

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

You'll have to either stop using that modern slang or provide an
explanation.

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.

You are evading the question of why there is little or no outcry about
kids getting killed in auto "accidents" and there is this great
demonstration of grief about school shootings.

Do you really think that the parents of a kid killed in a car crash
are any less sorrowful then the parents of a kid killed at school?


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.

If you'd been brought up in a gun family you would know that guns are
unloaded BEFORE you bring them in the house so they don't fly across
the room and kill someone.




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.
--
Cheers,

John B.

On Thu, 31 Jan 2013 15:25:30 -0500, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:



"Stormin Mormon" wrote in message ...

Listening to the radio, today. Aparently,
"instant checks" or universal background
checks is another form of registration.
Since, it can be reasoned, that anyone
who applies to be checked must be a gun
owner of some form.

Christopher A. Young
Learn more about Jesus
www.lds.org

===============================================

No, anyone applying for a background check could be a first-time gun buyer.

Records for successful purchasers must be destroyed in 24 hours. That is,
federal records. In some states, you have a de facto registration because
you have to fill out a purchase form (handguns in NJ, for example) for which
the *state* retains a copy.

Dealers must...must store a copy of the 4473. If/when they go out of
business..those forms are boxed up and shipped to the ATF, at which
point they are entered into their computer system. Often times, quite
badly entered..ie replete with errors that in later will bite someone
in the ass.

This is Federally done. At any time an ATF investigator can come in
and "review" the 4473s and take whatever "notes" he/she desires..in
some cases..using a portable scanner and scanning just about anything
they want...and occasionally....scanning EVERY 4473.

That is legal as well.

Gunner

The methodology of the left has always been:

1. Lie
2. Repeat the lie as many times as possible
3. Have as many people repeat the lie as often as possible
4. Eventually, the uninformed believe the lie
5. The lie will then be made into some form oflaw
6. Then everyone must conform to the lie

On Thu, 31 Jan 2013 21:07:56 -0500, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:

Third, 100% registration at the time of sale, new or used, commercial or
private sale, and creation of a database available to police. What that will
do is enable the easy tracking of guns back to the last legal purchaser.
Then find out what happened to the gun when that purchaser last had it. If
it was stolen, find out if the theft was reported within 48 hours of the
owner's awareness. If not, he gets a hefty fine. And no theft should go
unreported after any three-month period. That's long enough for any gun
owner to check his inventory and to notice if any gun is missing. Again, a
hefty fine if he reported his guns intact and it's discovered that a theft
occurred a year ago. That will be harder to prove, but it's a reasonable
imposition of responsibility. Once people know the law is serious about
this, I would expect a big jump in securing guns well and a heightened sense
of how seriously we all take it.

Utter bull****.

I know of far too many cases where firearms were stolen from people
who had them and never knew they were gone. An example was an elderly
woman who had her husbands guns in a locker out in the garage for 30
yrs after his passing. When she died..her next of kin went looking
for Grampas guns. And they were nowhere to be found. Some 20 of them.

I had 5 removed from one of my storage containers and only knew when
Taft PD called me asking me if I was missing a S&W 1917 45ACP
revolver. When I went to check..I found another 3 handguns and a
rifle gone. They were simply part of the collection...which is fairly
extensive.

Teenaged son of a roommate was coming over to visit his recovering
boozer momma..and had over time..found the keys, unlocked the
cabinet...and taken at least 5 guns. I ultimately got them all back,
but it involved a very large, very sharp knife, some terrorism and
implied violence and some sleuthing. And some of them were not in
very good shape. Ever seen what a 98% 1903 Springfield looks like
after its been dug up from a hole in a creekbed that had winter rain
water running over it for a month? They couldnt shoot it..because it
was chambered for the "short 06" round. So they buried it in a creek
bottom.

Since then..Ive not taken in any more "problem people" with kids and
have changed my locks to something less easy to open.

A friend of mine had welded up a very..very nice gun locker out of
3/8" plate steel and had installed it in his attached garage. He came
home from a weekend at the coast and discovered someone had come in
with a cutting torch and sliced one end off, causing a tremendous
amount of damage to the vault and to the garage itself, stealing some
$175k in collector arms. He has been getting them back, one at a time
for over 26 yrs. Some of them. Ever seen what a Supreme Presentation
engraved, Browning Centenial shotgun/rifle looks like after its
been owned by a sucession of meth freaks for 2 decades?

Oh they caught the guys who did it..but they didnt get the
guns...they were traded for Meth within hours of the theft and have
been found in 16 different states. They got pennies on the $100 for
the guns

And they were all fully documented, photographed and recorded... and
the information went into the NCIC stolen database within hours of
discovery of the theft. There are still at least 12 still "out there"
somewhere....26 yrs later. At least 2 have been "destroyed"...likely
taken by cops who fancied a $8k shotgun and one Merkel had been
hacksawed down to 12" and pistol gripped. That was a $6k sawed off to
be proud of......

"Securing" guns is simply wishful thinking.

Gunner







The methodology of the left has always been:

1. Lie
2. Repeat the lie as many times as possible
3. Have as many people repeat the lie as often as possible
4. Eventually, the uninformed believe the lie
5. The lie will then be made into some form oflaw
6. Then everyone must conform to the lie

On Fri, 1 Feb 2013 16:46:36 -0500, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:


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-)

--
Ed Huntress

'What part of "Shall not be infringed" do you not comprehend?

Btw...your First Amendment Rights have been removed. Please turn in
your computer on the way out.

Gunner

The methodology of the left has always been:

1. Lie
2. Repeat the lie as many times as possible
3. Have as many people repeat the lie as often as possible
4. Eventually, the uninformed believe the lie
5. The lie will then be made into some form oflaw
6. Then everyone must conform to the lie

On Fri, 1 Feb 2013 20:00:12 -0500, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:



wrote in message ...

On Fri, 1 Feb 2013 16:46:36 -0500, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:



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-)


Ed, if someone steals your car and commits a crime or injures someone
with it, should you be charged with a crime?

================================================= =====

No, and the difference is self-evident.

Please explain.

Gunner

The methodology of the left has always been:

1. Lie
2. Repeat the lie as many times as possible
3. Have as many people repeat the lie as often as possible
4. Eventually, the uninformed believe the lie
5. The lie will then be made into some form oflaw
6. Then everyone must conform to the lie

On Thu, 31 Jan 2013 21:42:16 -0500, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:


================================================= ==============

Yeah, I know about form 4473, but it's kept in a *bound book* by the dealer.
No one else has that data unless and until ATF has a reason to come looking
for it. And they won't know unless they start with manufacturers' shipments.
Then to the wholesaler, who one hopes also has good records, and so on. It's
a bitch and it all has to be done by hand, going through paper.

"As of July 2004, approved purchaser information is no longer kept for
ninety days but is instead destroyed within twenty-four hours of the
official NICS response to the dealer. The requirement that approved
purchaser information be destroyed within twenty-four hours has been
included in the appropriations bills funding the Department of Justice
(which includes ATF and the FBI) every year since 2004.5 Each of these acts
contains additional provisions which restrict disclosure of data obtained by
ATF via crime gun traces. In 2006, Congress failed to pass H.R. 5005, which
would have codified and made permanent the restrictions on disclosure of
crime gun trace data.

"As a result of these restrictions, ATF inspectors are no longer able to
compare the information on file with the dealer to the information the
dealer submitted to NICS. The Department of Justice Inspector General has
noted that the shortened retention time makes it much easier for corrupt
firearm dealers to avoid detection."

The FBI keeps records of those who failed the background check.

http://smartgunlaws.org/federal-law-...check-records/


http://www.justice.gov/olc/2005/nicsopinion.pdf

http://epic.org/privacy/firearms/

Think again.

The methodology of the left has always been:

1. Lie
2. Repeat the lie as many times as possible
3. Have as many people repeat the lie as often as possible
4. Eventually, the uninformed believe the lie
5. The lie will then be made into some form oflaw
6. Then everyone must conform to the lie

On Thu, 31 Jan 2013 22:20:09 -0500, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:



"Steve W." wrote in message ...

Ed Huntress wrote:

Yeah, I know about form 4473, but it's kept in a *bound book* by the
dealer.
No one else has that data unless and until ATF has a reason to come looking
for it. And they won't know unless they start with manufacturers'
shipments.
Then to the wholesaler, who one hopes also has good records, and so on.
It's
a bitch and it all has to be done by hand, going through paper.

"As of July 2004, approved purchaser information is no longer kept for
ninety days but is instead destroyed within twenty-four hours of the
official NICS response to the dealer. The requirement that approved
purchaser information be destroyed within twenty-four hours has been
included in the appropriations bills funding the Department of Justice
(which includes ATF and the FBI) every year since 2004.5 Each of these acts
contains additional provisions which restrict disclosure of data
obtained by
ATF via crime gun traces. In 2006, Congress failed to pass H.R. 5005, which
would have codified and made permanent the restrictions on disclosure of
crime gun trace data.

"As a result of these restrictions, ATF inspectors are no longer able to
compare the information on file with the dealer to the information the
dealer submitted to NICS. The Department of Justice Inspector General has
noted that the shortened retention time makes it much easier for corrupt
firearm dealers to avoid detection."

The FBI keeps records of those who failed the background check.

http://smartgunlaws.org/federal-law-...check-records/

================================================= =================
(SW)

And you BELIEVE that they actually destroy the computer record?

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

WHICH record? They don't destroy records of those who fail. The FBI keeps
them, under the law. As for those who pass, do you have some reason to
believe they DON'T destroy them? That's the law. Why would they risk their
careers, and jail, for the sake of keeping records that do them no good,
personally, and which are prohibited by law?

Or are you just generally paranoid? Wait, don't answer that...d8-)

================================================= ==================

(SW)

As for the ATF, I have witnessed them come into a dealer, open the book
and start writing down the names and addresses of EVERYONE who owned any
type of firearm they didn't like. They were there for over 6 hours and
when an employee questioned them about it being illegal HE was told that
unless he left the building immediately HE would be arrested for
violating the law himself.

I have also been told similar accounts from other dealers.

--
Steve W.

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

Any firearm "they didn't like"? And what makes you think they don't "like"
it? Or is it a type of firearm that's been used in some crime(s) they're
investigating?

It's their prerogative, Steve. The records are kept for the ATF (and, I
think the FBI, but I'm not sure about that) to investigate at ANY TIME in
the service of law enforcement. Part of that is checking to see if the FFL
holder is selling suspicious numbers of certain types of firearms, to
probable straw purchasers. The law on that is pretty extensive.

Keeping it in a book at the dealer is a nutty, paranoid reaction by the
extreme right wing of NRA members, which NRA lobbied for and won. It is,
IMO, crazy. It's as if they intended to defeat any attempt to prosecute the
chain of unlawful transactions that put guns in the hands of criminals. And
then they blame the ATF for failing to enforce the law. Neat trick, eh?

Still dont comprehend that pesky "shall not be infringed" thingy eh?

http://video.foxnews.com/v/211192233...intcmp=related


The methodology of the left has always been:

1. Lie
2. Repeat the lie as many times as possible
3. Have as many people repeat the lie as often as possible
4. Eventually, the uninformed believe the lie
5. The lie will then be made into some form oflaw
6. Then everyone must conform to the lie

On Sun, 03 Feb 2013 07:59:30 -0800, Gunner
wrote:

On Thu, 31 Jan 2013 15:25:30 -0500, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:



"Stormin Mormon" wrote in message ...

Listening to the radio, today. Aparently,
"instant checks" or universal background
checks is another form of registration.
Since, it can be reasoned, that anyone
who applies to be checked must be a gun
owner of some form.

Christopher A. Young
Learn more about Jesus
www.lds.org

============================================== =

No, anyone applying for a background check could be a first-time gun buyer.

Records for successful purchasers must be destroyed in 24 hours. That is,
federal records. In some states, you have a de facto registration because
you have to fill out a purchase form (handguns in NJ, for example) for which
the *state* retains a copy.

Dealers must...must store a copy of the 4473. If/when they go out of
business..those forms are boxed up and shipped to the ATF, at which
point they are entered into their computer system. Often times, quite
badly entered..ie replete with errors that in later will bite someone
in the ass.

Unless the business is sold or goes out of business, they exist only
in the "bound book" at the FFL holder's place of business. The ATF has
no way to go looking for a record on a particular serial number except
by starting with the manufacturer, going through the records of any
wholesaler, and then learning who the retailer was. After that, it's a
field trip to the retailer to go through their bound book.

That's a system designed (by the NRA) to defeat the tracing of guns by
overburdening the system with expense and legwork. The NRA succeeded
in their effort. It requires a large, and very expensive, effort to
find the first purchaser of just one gun.

And then, more often that not, if the original purchaser is found, it
is learned that the gun was "stolen," with no legal consequences to
him. Or he gave it to his brother as a gift, who *swore* that he was a
legal purchaser.

If you wanted to design a system that choked off the legal ways to
trace a gun, and that made it all but impossible to prosecute straw
purchasers, you couldn't do much better.


This is Federally done. At any time an ATF investigator can come in
and "review" the 4473s and take whatever "notes" he/she desires..in
some cases..using a portable scanner and scanning just about anything
they want...and occasionally....scanning EVERY 4473.

That is legal as well.

And if he's trying to track down a gun used in a crime, how does
"reviewing" one of the 65,000 or so gun-dealing FFL holders help? How
does the ATF know which one they're looking for? Or do they just go to
all 65,000 at once?

Somebody wasn't using their head when they let the NRA get away with
that one.

--
Ed Huntress


Gunner

The methodology of the left has always been:

1. Lie
2. Repeat the lie as many times as possible
3. Have as many people repeat the lie as often as possible
4. Eventually, the uninformed believe the lie
5. The lie will then be made into some form oflaw
6. Then everyone must conform to the lie

On Sun, 03 Feb 2013 09:11:38 -0800, Gunner
wrote:

On Thu, 31 Jan 2013 21:42:16 -0500, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:


================================================ ===============

Yeah, I know about form 4473, but it's kept in a *bound book* by the dealer.
No one else has that data unless and until ATF has a reason to come looking
for it. And they won't know unless they start with manufacturers' shipments.
Then to the wholesaler, who one hopes also has good records, and so on. It's
a bitch and it all has to be done by hand, going through paper.

"As of July 2004, approved purchaser information is no longer kept for
ninety days but is instead destroyed within twenty-four hours of the
official NICS response to the dealer. The requirement that approved
purchaser information be destroyed within twenty-four hours has been
included in the appropriations bills funding the Department of Justice
(which includes ATF and the FBI) every year since 2004.5 Each of these acts
contains additional provisions which restrict disclosure of data obtained by
ATF via crime gun traces. In 2006, Congress failed to pass H.R. 5005, which
would have codified and made permanent the restrictions on disclosure of
crime gun trace data.

"As a result of these restrictions, ATF inspectors are no longer able to
compare the information on file with the dealer to the information the
dealer submitted to NICS. The Department of Justice Inspector General has
noted that the shortened retention time makes it much easier for corrupt
firearm dealers to avoid detection."

The FBI keeps records of those who failed the background check.

http://smartgunlaws.org/federal-law-...check-records/


http://www.justice.gov/olc/2005/nicsopinion.pdf

http://epic.org/privacy/firearms/

Think again.

Gunner, do you ever read the references you link to? You'd better look
at those again.

The first one refers to records of those who failed a background
check, EXACTLY as I said above, in my last sentence. All that the
ruling you're referring to says is that records of an overturned
denial doesn't have to be destroyed. How many of them do you think
there are? How many appeals, in other words, are accepted?

The second one refers to the fact that the FBI can not access the
records of those on the TERRORIST WATCH LIST who have a background
check to buy a gun. Jesus, that was John Ashcroft just before he went
insane, I guess.

And then the legal loon who wrote that piece defends the "privacy" of
those on the terrorist watch list, and their right to have a gun.
Hell, terrorists don't have to bring their guns with them. They can
just buy them at any gun store, thanks to old John.

Have they all lost their minds?

--
Ed Huntress

On 2/1/2013 1:46 PM, Ed Huntress wrote:


"Delvin Benet" wrote in message
.. .

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.

No, it is not. It's about massively intrusive government getting set up
to confiscate guns.

On Sun, 03 Feb 2013 09:00:11 -0800, Gunner
wrote:

On Fri, 1 Feb 2013 20:00:12 -0500, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:



wrote in message ...

On Fri, 1 Feb 2013 16:46:36 -0500, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:



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-)


Ed, if someone steals your car and commits a crime or injures someone
with it, should you be charged with a crime?

================================================ ======

No, and the difference is self-evident.

Please explain.

Gunner

It's a kind of Rorschach test, Gunner, to see if you have enough sense
to own a gun or a car.

If your negligence with the car leads to a death, you can indeed be
held responsible. In NJ, for example, if you leave your keys in a car
and it's stolen, you're charged with a misdemeanor. If you leave your
keys in a car and it's NOT stolen, but the car is not in your
immediate control, then it's a motor vehicle violation.

You ability to secure a gun is much greater than your ability to
secure a car, and the gun, in the hands of a thief, is a much greater
threat to safety. So those countries who gun nutz point to as the ones
with sensible gun laws have decided that the responsibility on the gun
owner to keep his guns secure is nearly absolute.

It's been very effective. They have a lot of guns but little
gun-related crime. So it's a proven, pragmatic judgment that we ought
to copy.

On Sun, 03 Feb 2013 08:59:25 -0800, Gunner
wrote:

On Fri, 1 Feb 2013 16:46:36 -0500, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:


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-)

--
Ed Huntress

'What part of "Shall not be infringed" do you not comprehend?

I comprehend the part that you don't.

Start by looking up the historical meaning of "infringed." It meant
"to defeat" or "to invalidate" the exercise of something, like a right
or a license. If you're going to rely on original meaning, you need to
understand the historical meaning of the words.

Since Heller, the RKBA can't be infringed. You have a right to keep
arms -- the ones in "common use" for defending oneself or one's home.

Nowhere in history has it been interpreted to mean you can have ANY
gun, anywhere, at any time. Look at the citations in D.C. v. Heller
and you'll see the history that Scalia relied on for the ruling.


Btw...your First Amendment Rights have been removed. Please turn in
your computer on the way out.

Is that only in Taft, or throught Gun Fantasy Land?

--
Ed Huntress


Gunner

The methodology of the left has always been:

1. Lie
2. Repeat the lie as many times as possible
3. Have as many people repeat the lie as often as possible
4. Eventually, the uninformed believe the lie
5. The lie will then be made into some form oflaw
6. Then everyone must conform to the lie

On Sun, 03 Feb 2013 08:54:38 -0800, Gunner
wrote:

On Thu, 31 Jan 2013 21:07:56 -0500, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:

Third, 100% registration at the time of sale, new or used, commercial or
private sale, and creation of a database available to police. What that will
do is enable the easy tracking of guns back to the last legal purchaser.
Then find out what happened to the gun when that purchaser last had it. If
it was stolen, find out if the theft was reported within 48 hours of the
owner's awareness. If not, he gets a hefty fine. And no theft should go
unreported after any three-month period. That's long enough for any gun
owner to check his inventory and to notice if any gun is missing. Again, a
hefty fine if he reported his guns intact and it's discovered that a theft
occurred a year ago. That will be harder to prove, but it's a reasonable
imposition of responsibility. Once people know the law is serious about
this, I would expect a big jump in securing guns well and a heightened sense
of how seriously we all take it.

Utter bull****.

I know of far too many cases where firearms were stolen from people
who had them and never knew they were gone.

That's a problem, and that probably would come to an end, or nearly
so, if we adopted the gun laws of Switzerland, which you so frequently
cite with admiration.

An example was an elderly
woman who had her husbands guns in a locker out in the garage for 30
yrs after his passing. When she died..her next of kin went looking
for Grampas guns. And they were nowhere to be found. Some 20 of them.

I had 5 removed from one of my storage containers and only knew when
Taft PD called me asking me if I was missing a S&W 1917 45ACP
revolver. When I went to check..I found another 3 handguns and a
rifle gone. They were simply part of the collection...which is fairly
extensive.

So, you would have paid a hefty fine for that "revelation" if we had
the laws that you seem to admire so much.


Teenaged son of a roommate was coming over to visit his recovering
boozer momma..and had over time..found the keys, unlocked the
cabinet...and taken at least 5 guns.

Why was he able to "find the keys"? You hadn't secured your guns,
under the laws of those countries whose gun laws you admire so much.

I ultimately got them all back,
but it involved a very large, very sharp knife, some terrorism and
implied violence and some sleuthing.

So you violated the law to cover up for your own negligence. That's a
lot of jail time, Gunner, if you'd been caught.

And some of them were not in
very good shape. Ever seen what a 98% 1903 Springfield looks like
after its been dug up from a hole in a creekbed that had winter rain
water running over it for a month? They couldnt shoot it..because it
was chambered for the "short 06" round. So they buried it in a creek
bottom.

Your negligence was the cause.


Since then..Ive not taken in any more "problem people" with kids and
have changed my locks to something less easy to open.

A friend of mine had welded up a very..very nice gun locker out of
3/8" plate steel and had installed it in his attached garage. He came
home from a weekend at the coast and discovered someone had come in
with a cutting torch and sliced one end off, causing a tremendous
amount of damage to the vault and to the garage itself, stealing some
$175k in collector arms. He has been getting them back, one at a time
for over 26 yrs. Some of them. Ever seen what a Supreme Presentation
engraved, Browning Centenial shotgun/rifle looks like after its
been owned by a sucession of meth freaks for 2 decades?

He might have gotten off for that one. There are a few guns that would
get into criminal hands despite a responsible effort to secure them.
It doesn't happen very often, compared to:

"Overall, about 1.4 million guns, or an annual average of 232,400,
were stolen during burglaries and other property crimes in the
six-year period from 2005 through 2010. Of these stolen firearms, at
least 80% (186,800) had not been recovered at the time of the National
Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) interview." -- DOJ Crime Data Brief,
Nov. 2012

Those are just the ones that people admit to.


Oh they caught the guys who did it..but they didnt get the
guns...they were traded for Meth within hours of the theft and have
been found in 16 different states. They got pennies on the $100 for
the guns

And they were all fully documented, photographed and recorded... and
the information went into the NCIC stolen database within hours of
discovery of the theft. There are still at least 12 still "out there"
somewhere....26 yrs later. At least 2 have been "destroyed"...likely
taken by cops who fancied a $8k shotgun and one Merkel had been
hacksawed down to 12" and pistol gripped. That was a $6k sawed off to
be proud of......

You're lucky. Four of every five guns stolen in burglaries are never
recovered.

http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub...shbopc0510.pdf


"Securing" guns is simply wishful thinking.

Especially when they're "secured" in a nightstand drawer.

--
Ed Huntress


Gunner







The methodology of the left has always been:

1. Lie
2. Repeat the lie as many times as possible
3. Have as many people repeat the lie as often as possible
4. Eventually, the uninformed believe the lie
5. The lie will then be made into some form oflaw
6. Then everyone must conform to the lie

On Sat, 02 Feb 2013 23:23:51 -0500, Ed Huntress
wrote:


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.

Yet nearly as many people are murdered without guns as with guns.

Funny how that works eh wot?

And lets be fair here. Its generally Minorities who are both the
victims and the killers. With All weapons.

Shrug..fact of life.

Yet I dont see any talk about banning those minorities...do you?

Why not?


Gunner

The methodology of the left has always been:

1. Lie
2. Repeat the lie as many times as possible
3. Have as many people repeat the lie as often as possible
4. Eventually, the uninformed believe the lie
5. The lie will then be made into some form oflaw
6. Then everyone must conform to the lie

On Sun, 03 Feb 2013 19:21:02 +0700, John B.
wrote:

On Sat, 02 Feb 2013 23:23:51 -0500, Ed Huntress
wrote:

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
newsspog81vdbca26ooqqe0ehfgrklea6nh53@4ax. com...

On Fri, 1 Feb 2013 16:46:36 -0500, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:



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

Sure, ORIGINALLY. But how many hands did they pass thrugh before they
reached the criminal?

We usually can't tell, because we don't have registration, or even
background checks on private sales.

But further to that I seem to remember reading
about criminals in the 1930's robbing National Guard Armories. and I
know for a fact, because I grew up with the guy what done it, that a
load of stollen hunting rifles were shipped to Cuba in the very early
days of the revolution.

How many? Do they still rob N.G. Armories, after 80 years?

You can buy illegal trigger modifications for
assualt rifles.

Oh, that's reassuring. g How many have been recovered in crimes?

Yu can make a perfectly usible "shotgun" from two
pieces of tubing, a nail and a small block of steel.

You could, but how many of these are in use by criminals? How many
have been recovered? Are they really an issue, when all one has to do
is to go for Gunner's "storage lockers," and steal 20 perfectly good
guns at a time?

We've al;ready
mentioned the zip guns of yore.

Who needs a zip gun, when criminals steal $122 million worth of
firearms each year? (FBI statistics).

Hell, there's plenty of good stuff on the black market, thanks to a
vitually complete lack of accountability for gun owners to secrure
their guns.

Certainly you can record the sale of
every legally sold firearm but I would argue that there will be, as
long as it is financially viable, an underground gun market catering
to those who are engaged in an activity where they do not wish to have
an identifiable weapon.

It would be a hell of a lot smaller, over time, in all likelihood. If
you want to put a punch into those 200,000+ guns stolen each year,
make the owners responsible. It seems to work in some other countries.


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


That is my point exactly. I'm responsible so you make me fill out all
kinds of forms and papers. The guy down the street takes his baseball
bat out for a walk and comes back with an unregistered pistol and two
loaded magazines.

Unfortunately, we can't write laws just for you -- unless you move to
a desert island, by yourself. d8-)

How do you feel about having to take a driver's test, to pay for a
driver's license, and to fill out all that paperwork to buy and
license a car? Then they keep the registration records. I'll bet that
gets you steaming, eh?

Oh....that's about what's being proposed for guns, isn't it? d8-)


I get the head ache and he gets the gun.

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.

It is very comforting to have a weapon upon which innumerable people
have spent so many years perfecting :-)

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!

Then you shoot yourself :-(

That's your option. It does seem to be a pattern, but the kids get it
in the head, first. And that's the problem.


But lets be honest, it wasn't the gun that did it, the gun was laying
on some pawn shop shelf for a year or more, never shot a soul.

Ah, if we're talking about Adam Lanza, it was in his mother's gun
cabinet.

It was
a twisted individual that did it and until you can somehow eradicate
these people there will probably always school killings.

A twisted individual with a gun.

The last
Japanese school killing was done with a kitchen knife.

How many did he kill? How many school kitchen-knife murders have
resulted in something like, say Columbine plus Virginia Tech plus
Newtown numbers of deaths?


I do agree that having an assault rifle makes it a little easier but
the lack there of is not going to stop them. After all Timmy McVeigh
didn't have a gun.

Adam Lanza et al. sure did.



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?

You are asking very slanted questions. In fairness I might well answer
that I'd wait until the guy starts off for work and sneak up behind
him with a ball bat.

I am asking STUPID questions, not slanted ones. They're equally stupid
as equating automobile accidents with intentional murders committed
with a gun.



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?

Hardly a logical question. Effectively you seem to be justifying some
40,000 deaths a year because you are too lazy to walk to church. Given
the overwhelming propensity for blubber that seems to have permeated
the American public I would have to say that the walk, whether at
glock point or not, would be of great benefit to the worshipers.

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

You'll have to either stop using that modern slang or provide an
explanation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Going_postal


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.

You are evading the question of why there is little or no outcry about
kids getting killed in auto "accidents" and there is this great
demonstration of grief about school shootings.

That's right. I'm not evading it, I'm just expressing disbelief that
any mature adult would ask it.

Understanding the difference is essential to understanding what's
going on here.

Start with the fact that accidents are accidents. Then consider that
mass killings in schools are intentional -- and they're being done
lately with high-capacity semiautomatic firearms, which have become
the weapon of choice for getting your "Man Card Renewed."

Do you know what that phrase refers to? Did you see the Bushmaster
ads? If so, you should have some insight into the psychology of what's
been going on. You already know the mechanics of it. Then consider
that we're doing just about nothing about it. Finally, put yourself in
the place of a parent who's kid was killed intentionally, with a
weapon intended to spray bullets and that appeals mostly to people
with manhood insecurities, and you'll begin to get it.


Do you really think that the parents of a kid killed in a car crash
are any less sorrowful then the parents of a kid killed at school?

They're less anguished than if those kids were killed intentioanlly.
An accidental tragedy IS less difficult to accept than an intentional
killing of a first-grade kid.



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.

If you'd been brought up in a gun family you would know that guns are
unloaded BEFORE you bring them in the house so they don't fly across
the room and kill someone.

"Brought up in a gun family"? I started hunting at age 11, with my
dad's 12-ga. Stevens double and my own .22 rimfire rifle. My mother
was a very good rifle shot, too.

--
Ed Huntress





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.

On Sun, 03 Feb 2013 12:40:43 -0500, Ed Huntress
wrote:


No, anyone applying for a background check could be a first-time gun buyer.

Records for successful purchasers must be destroyed in 24 hours. That is,
federal records. In some states, you have a de facto registration because
you have to fill out a purchase form (handguns in NJ, for example) for which
the *state* retains a copy.

Dealers must...must store a copy of the 4473. If/when they go out of
business..those forms are boxed up and shipped to the ATF, at which
point they are entered into their computer system. Often times, quite
badly entered..ie replete with errors that in later will bite someone
in the ass.

Unless the business is sold or goes out of business, they exist only
in the "bound book" at the FFL holder's place of business. The ATF has
no way to go looking for a record on a particular serial number except
by starting with the manufacturer, going through the records of any
wholesaler, and then learning who the retailer was. After that, it's a
field trip to the retailer to go through their bound book.

That's a system designed (by the NRA) to defeat the tracing of guns by
overburdening the system with expense and legwork. The NRA succeeded
in their effort. It requires a large, and very expensive, effort to
find the first purchaser of just one gun.

And then, more often that not, if the original purchaser is found, it
is learned that the gun was "stolen," with no legal consequences to
him. Or he gave it to his brother as a gift, who *swore* that he was a
legal purchaser.

If you wanted to design a system that choked off the legal ways to
trace a gun, and that made it all but impossible to prosecute straw
purchasers, you couldn't do much better.


This is Federally done. At any time an ATF investigator can come in
and "review" the 4473s and take whatever "notes" he/she desires..in
some cases..using a portable scanner and scanning just about anything
they want...and occasionally....scanning EVERY 4473.

That is legal as well.

And if he's trying to track down a gun used in a crime, how does
"reviewing" one of the 65,000 or so gun-dealing FFL holders help? How
does the ATF know which one they're looking for? Or do they just go to
all 65,000 at once?

Somebody wasn't using their head when they let the NRA get away with
that one.

So you are admitting that the ATF is going into gunstores on fishing
expeditions?

Is that your admission?

Gunner

The methodology of the left has always been:

1. Lie
2. Repeat the lie as many times as possible
3. Have as many people repeat the lie as often as possible
4. Eventually, the uninformed believe the lie
5. The lie will then be made into some form oflaw
6. Then everyone must conform to the lie

On Sun, 03 Feb 2013 13:02:38 -0500, Ed Huntress
wrote:

On Sun, 03 Feb 2013 09:11:38 -0800, Gunner
wrote:

On Thu, 31 Jan 2013 21:42:16 -0500, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:


=============================================== ================

Yeah, I know about form 4473, but it's kept in a *bound book* by the dealer.
No one else has that data unless and until ATF has a reason to come looking
for it. And they won't know unless they start with manufacturers' shipments.
Then to the wholesaler, who one hopes also has good records, and so on. It's
a bitch and it all has to be done by hand, going through paper.

"As of July 2004, approved purchaser information is no longer kept for
ninety days but is instead destroyed within twenty-four hours of the
official NICS response to the dealer. The requirement that approved
purchaser information be destroyed within twenty-four hours has been
included in the appropriations bills funding the Department of Justice
(which includes ATF and the FBI) every year since 2004.5 Each of these acts
contains additional provisions which restrict disclosure of data obtained by
ATF via crime gun traces. In 2006, Congress failed to pass H.R. 5005, which
would have codified and made permanent the restrictions on disclosure of
crime gun trace data.

"As a result of these restrictions, ATF inspectors are no longer able to
compare the information on file with the dealer to the information the
dealer submitted to NICS. The Department of Justice Inspector General has
noted that the shortened retention time makes it much easier for corrupt
firearm dealers to avoid detection."

The FBI keeps records of those who failed the background check.

http://smartgunlaws.org/federal-law-...check-records/


http://www.justice.gov/olc/2005/nicsopinion.pdf

http://epic.org/privacy/firearms/

Think again.

Gunner, do you ever read the references you link to? You'd better look
at those again.

The first one refers to records of those who failed a background
check, EXACTLY as I said above, in my last sentence. All that the
ruling you're referring to says is that records of an overturned
denial doesn't have to be destroyed. How many of them do you think
there are? How many appeals, in other words, are accepted?

The second one refers to the fact that the FBI can not access the
records of those on the TERRORIST WATCH LIST who have a background
check to buy a gun. Jesus, that was John Ashcroft just before he went
insane, I guess.

And then the legal loon who wrote that piece defends the "privacy" of
those on the terrorist watch list, and their right to have a gun.
Hell, terrorists don't have to bring their guns with them. They can
just buy them at any gun store, thanks to old John.

Have they all lost their minds?

Yes they have. With 20,000+ Gun Laws on the books...its all insane.

Im all in favor of InstaCheck.

No need for "registration" at all.

Gunner

The methodology of the left has always been:

1. Lie
2. Repeat the lie as many times as possible
3. Have as many people repeat the lie as often as possible
4. Eventually, the uninformed believe the lie
5. The lie will then be made into some form oflaw
6. Then everyone must conform to the lie

On Sun, 03 Feb 2013 10:07:48 -0800, Delvin Benet ýt wrote:

On 2/1/2013 1:46 PM, Ed Huntress wrote:


"Delvin Benet" wrote in message
.. .

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.

No, it is not. It's about massively intrusive government getting set up
to confiscate guns.

That makes you a paranoid delusional, Delvin. There is no evidence
that the US government intends to confiscate guns. What they're trying
to do is to dry up the supply of guns to criminals. They've said it,
and there is nothing sensible to refute it.

In other words, you've earned a spot in the Gun Nutz bucket.

--
Ed Huntress

On Feb 3, 1:42*pm, Ed Huntress wrote:
On Sun, 03 Feb 2013 10:07:48 -0800, Delvin Benet ýt wrote:
On 2/1/2013 1:46 PM, Ed Huntress wrote:

"Delvin Benet" *wrote in message
...

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.

No, it is not. *It's about massively intrusive government getting set up
to confiscate guns.

That makes you a paranoid delusional, Delvin. There is no evidence
that the US government intends to confiscate guns. What they're trying
to do is to dry up the supply of guns to criminals. They've said it,
and there is nothing sensible to refute it.

*In other words, you've earned a spot in the Gun Nutz bucket.

--
Ed Huntress

Took you long enough to figure that out.

How much longer will it take for you to figure out all his other sock
puppets?

On Sun, 03 Feb 2013 12:40:43 -0500, Ed Huntress
wrote:

On Sun, 03 Feb 2013 07:59:30 -0800, Gunner
wrote:

On Thu, 31 Jan 2013 15:25:30 -0500, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:



"Stormin Mormon" wrote in message ...

Listening to the radio, today. Aparently,
"instant checks" or universal background
checks is another form of registration.
Since, it can be reasoned, that anyone
who applies to be checked must be a gun
owner of some form.

Christopher A. Young
Learn more about Jesus
www.lds.org

============================================= ==

No, anyone applying for a background check could be a first-time gun buyer.

Records for successful purchasers must be destroyed in 24 hours. That is,
federal records. In some states, you have a de facto registration because
you have to fill out a purchase form (handguns in NJ, for example) for which
the *state* retains a copy.

Dealers must...must store a copy of the 4473. If/when they go out of
business..those forms are boxed up and shipped to the ATF, at which
point they are entered into their computer system. Often times, quite
badly entered..ie replete with errors that in later will bite someone
in the ass.

Unless the business is sold or goes out of business, they exist only
in the "bound book" at the FFL holder's place of business. The ATF has
no way to go looking for a record on a particular serial number except
by starting with the manufacturer, going through the records of any
wholesaler, and then learning who the retailer was. After that, it's a
field trip to the retailer to go through their bound book.

That's a system designed (by the NRA) to defeat the tracing of guns by
overburdening the system with expense and legwork. The NRA succeeded
in their effort. It requires a large, and very expensive, effort to
find the first purchaser of just one gun.

And then, more often that not, if the original purchaser is found, it
is learned that the gun was "stolen," with no legal consequences to
him. Or he gave it to his brother as a gift, who *swore* that he was a
legal purchaser.

If you wanted to design a system that choked off the legal ways to
trace a gun, and that made it all but impossible to prosecute straw
purchasers, you couldn't do much better.


This is Federally done. At any time an ATF investigator can come in
and "review" the 4473s and take whatever "notes" he/she desires..in
some cases..using a portable scanner and scanning just about anything
they want...and occasionally....scanning EVERY 4473.

That is legal as well.

And if he's trying to track down a gun used in a crime, how does
"reviewing" one of the 65,000 or so gun-dealing FFL holders help? How
does the ATF know which one they're looking for? Or do they just go to
all 65,000 at once?

Somebody wasn't using their head when they let the NRA get away with
that one.

But Ed, is there a real effort made to track down a gun used in a
crime? When I lived in Maine I was friendly with a State Police
Officer and from his descriptions of a couple of crimes it appeared
that the police were far more intent on capturing the guy that did the
robbery, or in one case shot a cop, than finding a specific gun.

In the case of the Cop shooting the perpetrator resisted arrest and
was shot and killed so the question of the gun never came up but in a
Bangor bank robbery the robbers were captured and tried and sentenced
to the state prison (and the question of gun ownership didn't come
up).

I have this feeling that a national gun record database may well be an
exercise intended to pacify the electorate by demonstrating that "See,
we are doing something".

--
Cheers,

John B.

On Sun, 03 Feb 2013 16:20:26 -0500, Ed Huntress
wrote:
This thread was getting so long that it wouldn't download so I've cut
out much of it.


Who needs a zip gun, when criminals steal $122 million worth of
firearms each year? (FBI statistics).

You rather defeat the argument of gun records don't you. $122 million
dollars worth of stolen guns in the market place, outside the
registration system.

Hell, there's plenty of good stuff on the black market, thanks to a
vitually complete lack of accountability for gun owners to secrure
their guns.

Yes, rather.

Certainly you can record the sale of
every legally sold firearm but I would argue that there will be, as
long as it is financially viable, an underground gun market catering
to those who are engaged in an activity where they do not wish to have
an identifiable weapon.

It would be a hell of a lot smaller, over time, in all likelihood. If
you want to put a punch into those 200,000+ guns stolen each year,
make the owners responsible. It seems to work in some other countries.

Rather a strange attitude. Prosecute the victim.



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


That is my point exactly. I'm responsible so you make me fill out all
kinds of forms and papers. The guy down the street takes his baseball
bat out for a walk and comes back with an unregistered pistol and two
loaded magazines.

Unfortunately, we can't write laws just for you -- unless you move to
a desert island, by yourself. d8-)

Certainly not. But how about writing laws to punish the evil doers.
"Use of a firearm in a crime results in a mandatory death sentence",
that ought to cut down gun crime a bit.

How do you feel about having to take a driver's test, to pay for a
driver's license, and to fill out all that paperwork to buy and
license a car? Then they keep the registration records. I'll bet that
gets you steaming, eh?

And it doesn't seem to curtail auto deaths, does it? Which is my
point, will that fu fur about guns actually do any good? Or is it just
another political football that will result in more complexity for the
honest man?


Oh....that's about what's being proposed for guns, isn't it? d8-)


I get the head ache and he gets the gun.

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.

It is very comforting to have a weapon upon which innumerable people
have spent so many years perfecting :-)

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!

Then you shoot yourself :-(

That's your option. It does seem to be a pattern, but the kids get it
in the head, first. And that's the problem.


But lets be honest, it wasn't the gun that did it, the gun was laying
on some pawn shop shelf for a year or more, never shot a soul.

Ah, if we're talking about Adam Lanza, it was in his mother's gun
cabinet.

It was
a twisted individual that did it and until you can somehow eradicate
these people there will probably always school killings.

A twisted individual with a gun.

The last
Japanese school killing was done with a kitchen knife.

How many did he kill? How many school kitchen-knife murders have
resulted in something like, say Columbine plus Virginia Tech plus
Newtown numbers of deaths?

Ed, you argue without merit. You seem to be saying that a limited
number of murders is rather meaningless. so where do we draw the line?
Kill one and "what the hell", Two and it is "My goodness". Three and
"what a shame".....


I do agree that having an assault rifle makes it a little easier but
the lack there of is not going to stop them. After all Timmy McVeigh
didn't have a gun.

Adam Lanza et al. sure did.



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?

You are asking very slanted questions. In fairness I might well answer
that I'd wait until the guy starts off for work and sneak up behind
him with a ball bat.

I am asking STUPID questions, not slanted ones. They're equally stupid
as equating automobile accidents with intentional murders committed
with a gun.



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?

Hardly a logical question. Effectively you seem to be justifying some
40,000 deaths a year because you are too lazy to walk to church. Given
the overwhelming propensity for blubber that seems to have permeated
the American public I would have to say that the walk, whether at
glock point or not, would be of great benefit to the worshipers.

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

You'll have to either stop using that modern slang or provide an
explanation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Going_postal

The reference refers to a date several years after I departed the U.S.


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.

You are evading the question of why there is little or no outcry about
kids getting killed in auto "accidents" and there is this great
demonstration of grief about school shootings.

That's right. I'm not evading it, I'm just expressing disbelief that
any mature adult would ask it.

Understanding the difference is essential to understanding what's
going on here.

Start with the fact that accidents are accidents. Then consider that

How many "automobile accidents" are actually accidents and not caused
by unsafe driving acts?

As I have mentioned, years ago I was friends with a Maine State
Policemen. He told me that the police had gotten an act passed in the
legislature that allowed them to impound every car involved in a
death. they took the car to the police garage and stripped it down to
determine whether the "accident" was caused by mechanical failure.
they found that in nearly no cases was there a mechanical reason for
the "accident". Which leaves ?

mass killings in schools are intentional -- and they're being done
lately with high-capacity semiautomatic firearms, which have become
the weapon of choice for getting your "Man Card Renewed."

Do you know what that phrase refers to? Did you see the Bushmaster
ads? If so, you should have some insight into the psychology of what's
been going on. You already know the mechanics of it. Then consider
that we're doing just about nothing about it. Finally, put yourself in
the place of a parent who's kid was killed intentionally, with a
weapon intended to spray bullets and that appeals mostly to people
with manhood insecurities, and you'll begin to get it.

I can't objectively answer as none of my children have died but I
doubt very much that my feelings would be very different whether
someone had gone into a classroom and killed the kid or whether they
had run them down with a car.

I really cannot believe that people would rationalize the death of a
child by saying, "Oh, I feel so much better about Johnny's death as he
was run down by a drunken driver and not shot in the schoolroom".

In short, I believe the argument is without substance.


Do you really think that the parents of a kid killed in a car crash
are any less sorrowful then the parents of a kid killed at school?

They're less anguished than if those kids were killed intentioanlly.
An accidental tragedy IS less difficult to accept than an intentional
killing of a first-grade kid.

Yes, Guy driving 10 - 20 miles an hour over the speed limit, jumping
lights and making a rolling stop at the corner stop sign and it is
referred to as an "accident" so that is o.k. Really, really, different
from a school shooting.

Me thinks that you've been brainwashed.


"Brought up in a gun family"? I started hunting at age 11, with my
dad's 12-ga. Stevens double and my own .22 rimfire rifle. My mother
was a very good rifle shot, too.

And how many time has a gun in your household up and shot someone
across the room?

--
Cheers,

John B.

Gunner wrote:

Ever seen what a Supreme Presentation engraved, Browning Centenial
shotgun/rifle looks like after it's been owned by a sucession of meth
freaks for 2 decades?


As bad as mind on liberalism for a month, that has holes corroded
through the vital spots & enough rust to make 50 miles of video tape?

On Sun, 03 Feb 2013 14:22:29 -0500, Ed Huntress
wrote:

On Sun, 03 Feb 2013 09:00:11 -0800, Gunner
wrote:

On Fri, 1 Feb 2013 20:00:12 -0500, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:



wrote in message ...

On Fri, 1 Feb 2013 16:46:36 -0500, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:



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-)


Ed, if someone steals your car and commits a crime or injures someone
with it, should you be charged with a crime?

=============================================== =======

No, and the difference is self-evident.

Please explain.

Gunner

It's a kind of Rorschach test, Gunner, to see if you have enough sense
to own a gun or a car.

If your negligence with the car leads to a death, you can indeed be
held responsible. In NJ, for example, if you leave your keys in a car
and it's stolen, you're charged with a misdemeanor. If you leave your
keys in a car and it's NOT stolen, but the car is not in your
immediate control, then it's a motor vehicle violation.

You ability to secure a gun is much greater than your ability to
secure a car, and the gun, in the hands of a thief, is a much greater
threat to safety.

So all the locking systems and alarms and seat belts and stiff
penalties for drunk driving and safety cages and whatnot in
automobiles was money spent for nothing.

Fascinating.

And how many vehicle deaths did we have last year? 42,000 +

"Overall, there were an estimated 247,421,120 registered passenger
vehicles in the United States according to a 2005 DOT study. "

"There is an estimated 325,000,000 firearms privately owned in the
US...yet in the U.S. for 2010, there were 31,513 deaths from
firearms, distributed as follows by mode of death: Suicide 19,308;
Homicide 11,015; Accident 600.

Yet Eddy....there were far less deaths because of guns than vehicles
and it includes Suicide!

Whats up with that? Hummmm?

Say...seen this?

http://www.webmd.com/mental-health/n...f-injury-death

The top five leading causes of injury-related deaths we

1 Suicide
2 Motor vehicle crashes
3 Poisoning
4 Falls
5 Homicide




So those countries who gun nutz point to as the ones
with sensible gun laws have decided that the responsibility on the gun
owner to keep his guns secure is nearly absolute.

Which countries are you refering to? Mexico with its near draconian
gun ban? Its between the 4th - 6th highest homicide rate on the
planet.

It's been very effective. They have a lot of guns but little
gun-related crime. So it's a proven, pragmatic judgment that we ought
to copy.

They also have a very homogenic population with virtually no blacks
and hispanics and a very high level of education and culture.

Seems to me that once again..you are choosing to use data your very
own way..and in such a fashion that it bolsters your world
view..despite being utterly flawed.

Welcome back Eddy.

Gunner

The methodology of the left has always been:

1. Lie
2. Repeat the lie as many times as possible
3. Have as many people repeat the lie as often as possible
4. Eventually, the uninformed believe the lie
5. The lie will then be made into some form oflaw
6. Then everyone must conform to the lie

On Sun, 03 Feb 2013 14:59:06 -0500, Ed Huntress
wrote:

On Sun, 03 Feb 2013 08:54:38 -0800, Gunner
wrote:

On Thu, 31 Jan 2013 21:07:56 -0500, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:

Third, 100% registration at the time of sale, new or used, commercial or
private sale, and creation of a database available to police. What that will
do is enable the easy tracking of guns back to the last legal purchaser.
Then find out what happened to the gun when that purchaser last had it. If
it was stolen, find out if the theft was reported within 48 hours of the
owner's awareness. If not, he gets a hefty fine. And no theft should go
unreported after any three-month period. That's long enough for any gun
owner to check his inventory and to notice if any gun is missing. Again, a
hefty fine if he reported his guns intact and it's discovered that a theft
occurred a year ago. That will be harder to prove, but it's a reasonable
imposition of responsibility. Once people know the law is serious about
this, I would expect a big jump in securing guns well and a heightened sense
of how seriously we all take it.

Utter bull****.

I know of far too many cases where firearms were stolen from people
who had them and never knew they were gone.

That's a problem, and that probably would come to an end, or nearly
so, if we adopted the gun laws of Switzerland, which you so frequently
cite with admiration.

Some parts of Switzerland are indeed admirable. Others...not so much.
Or do you consider a lack of a national sense of humor to be
admirable?

An example was an elderly
woman who had her husbands guns in a locker out in the garage for 30
yrs after his passing. When she died..her next of kin went looking
for Grampas guns. And they were nowhere to be found. Some 20 of them.

I had 5 removed from one of my storage containers and only knew when
Taft PD called me asking me if I was missing a S&W 1917 45ACP
revolver. When I went to check..I found another 3 handguns and a
rifle gone. They were simply part of the collection...which is fairly
extensive.

So, you would have paid a hefty fine for that "revelation" if we had
the laws that you seem to admire so much.

"the laws"? Oh..you mean I think we should turn the States into
Cantons and do all the banking and make a sense of humor beyond "dry"
to be illegal?

Those laws? Snicker...when you are in a hole Eddy..first thing you
should learn..is when to stop digging.


Teenaged son of a roommate was coming over to visit his recovering
boozer momma..and had over time..found the keys, unlocked the
cabinet...and taken at least 5 guns.

Why was he able to "find the keys"? You hadn't secured your guns,
under the laws of those countries whose gun laws you admire so much.

Good question. They were hidden inside of a hollowed out book in a
book shelf that had 350 books in it. I still dont know how he got
them.

I ultimately got them all back,
but it involved a very large, very sharp knife, some terrorism and
implied violence and some sleuthing.

So you violated the law to cover up for your own negligence. That's a
lot of jail time, Gunner, if you'd been caught.

Which law was that? Hummm? VBG

And some of them were not in
very good shape. Ever seen what a 98% 1903 Springfield looks like
after its been dug up from a hole in a creekbed that had winter rain
water running over it for a month? They couldnt shoot it..because it
was chambered for the "short 06" round. So they buried it in a creek
bottom.

Your negligence was the cause.

Nope. Your typical addled brain child of a drug addict was to blame.
If he had set the house on fire..it still would have been HIS fault.

You really HAVE swung to the Dark Side havent you? Getting work from
the DNC these days?


Since then..Ive not taken in any more "problem people" with kids and
have changed my locks to something less easy to open.

A friend of mine had welded up a very..very nice gun locker out of
3/8" plate steel and had installed it in his attached garage. He came
home from a weekend at the coast and discovered someone had come in
with a cutting torch and sliced one end off, causing a tremendous
amount of damage to the vault and to the garage itself, stealing some
$175k in collector arms. He has been getting them back, one at a time
for over 26 yrs. Some of them. Ever seen what a Supreme Presentation
engraved, Browning Centenial shotgun/rifle looks like after its
been owned by a sucession of meth freaks for 2 decades?

He might have gotten off for that one. There are a few guns that would
get into criminal hands despite a responsible effort to secure them.
It doesn't happen very often, compared to:

Oh...what...he should have encased the gun vault in 24" of rebarred
hydraulic concrete and trip wires hardwired to the local police
department?

"Overall, about 1.4 million guns, or an annual average of 232,400,
were stolen during burglaries and other property crimes in the
six-year period from 2005 through 2010. Of these stolen firearms, at
least 80% (186,800) had not been recovered at the time of the National
Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) interview." -- DOJ Crime Data Brief,
Nov. 2012

Those are just the ones that people admit to.

Ayup. Sure were a lot of guns Stolen by felons who would typically
vote Democrat if they were allowed to vote. But then...how many armed
robberies happened each year?

Hummm lets see here.....

"Nationwide in 2005, there were an estimated 417,122 robbery
offenses."

Less than half involved firearms. And your solution would be to ban
or lock up cash so it couldnt be gotten to by criminals. Is that your
belief as well?





Oh they caught the guys who did it..but they didnt get the
guns...they were traded for Meth within hours of the theft and have
been found in 16 different states. They got pennies on the $100 for
the guns

And they were all fully documented, photographed and recorded... and
the information went into the NCIC stolen database within hours of
discovery of the theft. There are still at least 12 still "out there"
somewhere....26 yrs later. At least 2 have been "destroyed"...likely
taken by cops who fancied a $8k shotgun and one Merkel had been
hacksawed down to 12" and pistol gripped. That was a $6k sawed off to
be proud of......

You're lucky. Four of every five guns stolen in burglaries are never
recovered.

They werent my guns.

http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub...shbopc0510.pdf


"Securing" guns is simply wishful thinking.

Especially when they're "secured" in a nightstand drawer.


Or in a 3/8" steel vault.

You simply dont get it do you? The criminal had to break into a home
(felony), ransack the home (felony) and finally steal a firearm
(felony). Why dont you suggest that everyone be required to tear down
their homes and build bunkers? They couldnt steal knives, pipes,
gasoline, guns , money, drugs or anything else that might be used
ILLEGALLY in other crimes.

Sure makes a lot of sense to me. **** yes!! You first, bozo.

Gunner

The methodology of the left has always been:

1. Lie
2. Repeat the lie as many times as possible
3. Have as many people repeat the lie as often as possible
4. Eventually, the uninformed believe the lie
5. The lie will then be made into some form oflaw
6. Then everyone must conform to the lie

On Sun, 03 Feb 2013 16:20:26 -0500, Ed Huntress
wrote:

On Sun, 03 Feb 2013 19:21:02 +0700, John B.
wrote:

On Sat, 02 Feb 2013 23:23:51 -0500, Ed Huntress
wrote:

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
newsspog81vdbca26ooqqe0ehfgrklea6nh53@4ax .com...

On Fri, 1 Feb 2013 16:46:36 -0500, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:



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

Sure, ORIGINALLY. But how many hands did they pass thrugh before they
reached the criminal?

We usually can't tell, because we don't have registration, or even
background checks on private sales.

Tsk tsk tsk...again Eddy lies. Or has been living in a cave for a
couple decades. Shall I refer you to Californias gun laws Eddy?

But further to that I seem to remember reading
about criminals in the 1930's robbing National Guard Armories. and I
know for a fact, because I grew up with the guy what done it, that a
load of stollen hunting rifles were shipped to Cuba in the very early
days of the revolution.

How many? Do they still rob N.G. Armories, after 80 years?

Sure they do. Rather regularly in fact.


You can buy illegal trigger modifications for
assualt rifles.

Oh, that's reassuring. g How many have been recovered in crimes?

I think that last year there were 3 arrests for them.

Yu can make a perfectly usible "shotgun" from two
pieces of tubing, a nail and a small block of steel.

You could, but how many of these are in use by criminals? How many
have been recovered? Are they really an issue, when all one has to do
is to go for Gunner's "storage lockers," and steal 20 perfectly good
guns at a time?

Oh Eddy...you simply shoot a guy with the homebrew shotgun, take his
now available firearms and basic load of ammo..and hand the shotgun to
the guy behind you so he can get his own good weapon. The US
pioneered that with the Liberator pistol, doncha know?


We've al;ready
mentioned the zip guns of yore.

Who needs a zip gun, when criminals steal $122 million worth of
firearms each year? (FBI statistics).

Good question. Yet when Zip guns were being made regularly..you could
buy just about any rifle or pistol you wanted by mailing in a rather
small check or money order to the hundreds of dealers in the back of
magazines. No checking needed. In a week or two, you would get your
M1 Carbine, or 20mm antitank gun or Colt 1911 or Luger in the mail.



Hell, there's plenty of good stuff on the black market, thanks to a
vitually complete lack of accountability for gun owners to secrure
their guns.

Yet cops get their guns stolen regularly. Odd that our Law Enforcement
Personel do such a poor job of securing their guns. That includes
machine guns btw. Want a list of the last few cases?

VBG


Certainly you can record the sale of
every legally sold firearm but I would argue that there will be, as
long as it is financially viable, an underground gun market catering
to those who are engaged in an activity where they do not wish to have
an identifiable weapon.

It would be a hell of a lot smaller, over time, in all likelihood. If
you want to put a punch into those 200,000+ guns stolen each year,
make the owners responsible. It seems to work in some other countries.

Which ones might those be?


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


That is my point exactly. I'm responsible so you make me fill out all
kinds of forms and papers. The guy down the street takes his baseball
bat out for a walk and comes back with an unregistered pistol and two
loaded magazines.

Unfortunately, we can't write laws just for you -- unless you move to
a desert island, by yourself. d8-)

So you dont disagree about his comment about the baseball bat..but are
simply going off on another diversion?

How do you feel about having to take a driver's test, to pay for a
driver's license, and to fill out all that paperwork to buy and
license a car? Then they keep the registration records. I'll bet that
gets you steaming, eh?

Which Amendment to the Constitution covers that? Any?

Oh....that's about what's being proposed for guns, isn't it? d8-)

"Shall not be infringed", 2nd Amendment, United States Constitition,
1787.




I get the head ache and he gets the gun.

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.

It is very comforting to have a weapon upon which innumerable people
have spent so many years perfecting :-)

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!

Then you shoot yourself :-(

That's your option. It does seem to be a pattern, but the kids get it
in the head, first. And that's the problem.

So arm the teachers. It doesnt take rocket science.


But lets be honest, it wasn't the gun that did it, the gun was laying
on some pawn shop shelf for a year or more, never shot a soul.

Ah, if we're talking about Adam Lanza, it was in his mother's gun
cabinet.

Which consisted of what? China cabinet or Gun Safe?

Hummmm???


It was
a twisted individual that did it and until you can somehow eradicate
these people there will probably always school killings.

A twisted individual with a gun.

Ayup..in a Leftwing Mandated Gun Free Zone. Seems to be a lot of
murders in those really safe Gun Free Zones this last year eh?

The last
Japanese school killing was done with a kitchen knife.

How many did he kill? How many school kitchen-knife murders have
resulted in something like, say Columbine plus Virginia Tech plus
Newtown numbers of deaths?

What..those Gun Free Zones? You..you..you mean the signs didnt work?

No ****???


I do agree that having an assault rifle makes it a little easier but
the lack there of is not going to stop them. After all Timmy McVeigh
didn't have a gun.

Adam Lanza et al. sure did.

And no one else did..in that Gun Free Zone.



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?

You are asking very slanted questions. In fairness I might well answer
that I'd wait until the guy starts off for work and sneak up behind
him with a ball bat.

I am asking STUPID questions, not slanted ones. They're equally stupid
as equating automobile accidents with intentional murders committed
with a gun.



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?

Hardly a logical question. Effectively you seem to be justifying some
40,000 deaths a year because you are too lazy to walk to church. Given
the overwhelming propensity for blubber that seems to have permeated
the American public I would have to say that the walk, whether at
glock point or not, would be of great benefit to the worshipers.

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

You'll have to either stop using that modern slang or provide an
explanation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Going_postal


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.

You are evading the question of why there is little or no outcry about
kids getting killed in auto "accidents" and there is this great
demonstration of grief about school shootings.

That's right. I'm not evading it, I'm just expressing disbelief that
any mature adult would ask it.

When you are discussing Leftwing/Liberal/Progressive..surely you cant
be discussing "mature adult" can you?


Understanding the difference is essential to understanding what's
going on here.

Damned shame you think on a slant.

Start with the fact that accidents are accidents. Then consider that
mass killings in schools are intentional -- and they're being done
lately with high-capacity semiautomatic firearms, which have become
the weapon of choice for getting your "Man Card Renewed."

Do you know what that phrase refers to? Did you see the Bushmaster
ads? If so, you should have some insight into the psychology of what's
been going on. You already know the mechanics of it. Then consider
that we're doing just about nothing about it. Finally, put yourself in
the place of a parent who's kid was killed intentionally, with a
weapon intended to spray bullets and that appeals mostly to people
with manhood insecurities, and you'll begin to get it.

spray bullets? You mean the Department of Homeland Security thinks
Bullet Sprayers are suitable for self defense??????

http://watchdogwire.com/florida/2013...sonal-defense/

Say it isnt so!!!



Do you really think that the parents of a kid killed in a car crash
are any less sorrowful then the parents of a kid killed at school?

They're less anguished than if those kids were killed intentioanlly.
An accidental tragedy IS less difficult to accept than an intentional
killing of a first-grade kid.

Is it?



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.

If you'd been brought up in a gun family you would know that guns are
unloaded BEFORE you bring them in the house so they don't fly across
the room and kill someone.

"Brought up in a gun family"? I started hunting at age 11, with my
dad's 12-ga. Stevens double and my own .22 rimfire rifle. My mother
was a very good rifle shot, too.


And since then..you became a nutjob and a AntiGun zealot of the worst
sort.

Dementia? Payments from the DNC? What did it Eddy?

Gunner

The methodology of the left has always been:

1. Lie
2. Repeat the lie as many times as possible
3. Have as many people repeat the lie as often as possible
4. Eventually, the uninformed believe the lie
5. The lie will then be made into some form oflaw
6. Then everyone must conform to the lie

On Sun, 03 Feb 2013 16:42:26 -0500, Ed Huntress
wrote:

On Sun, 03 Feb 2013 10:07:48 -0800, Delvin Benet ýt wrote:

On 2/1/2013 1:46 PM, Ed Huntress wrote:


"Delvin Benet" wrote in message
.. .

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.

No, it is not. It's about massively intrusive government getting set up
to confiscate guns.

That makes you a paranoid delusional, Delvin. There is no evidence
that the US government intends to confiscate guns. What they're trying
to do is to dry up the supply of guns to criminals. They've said it,
and there is nothing sensible to refute it.

In other words, you've earned a spot in the Gun Nutz bucket.

Eddy is in Denial again. He must have gotten a gig from Chucky Schumer
again. How many pieces of silver is he paying you Eddy?

Gunner

The methodology of the left has always been:

1. Lie
2. Repeat the lie as many times as possible
3. Have as many people repeat the lie as often as possible
4. Eventually, the uninformed believe the lie
5. The lie will then be made into some form oflaw
6. Then everyone must conform to the lie