A responsible gun owner......Not!
- Thread starter Ragman
- Start date
That's funny. If you sold a gun to a friend, how could you know !00% that they have no disqualifying history? That they weren't dishonorably discharged, or diagnosed or treated for mental illness, or are a dug abuser?
The answer is you don't. You can't. As I pointed out already, if we really knew our family and friends that well, predators of small children would have no victims - but they do. A lot of them, in fact. Because people with things to hide get really good at hiding them, even from those who are close to them. They fool us because we don't want to think badly of people we like.
Which is why Leo is incorrect about "must know 100% that person is legally eligible to buy and own a firearm" before selling it to them. If you do, in fact, know for sure that they can't legally buy or own a firearm, you can't sell it to them. Same goes if you suspect they are ineligible. But there is no burden on you as the seller to find out 100% for sure by investigating someone's mental health records history, their armed service records, or anything else for which the average person lacks utterly the resources to obtain. So unless you already know 100% that they are ineligible, or suspect in good conscious they are ineligible, there's no reason not to sell them a firearm.
That sounds like a question coming from someone who wants to just eliminate all private gun sales and are looking for a reason to go, "See? There ya go." The law is pretty simple in that if someone is disqualified from possessing a firearm, or if you believe then to be disqualified, then you can't sell them a firearm. No one has to prove or disprove what you may have suspected. If you sell a firearm to someone who is disqualified, then you automatically assume the burden of proof that you did not know or suspect they were disqualified. Pleading ignorance and saying, "Well, I didn't know," won't help you.
It's very enforceable, and is enforced regularly. You can lose your own right to possess firearms, fines are assessed, sometimes jail time, and some have even been charged with accessory to the crimes committed with the guns they've sold.
I wouldn't say we should eliminate all private gun sales, but the friends and family provision seems a pretty easy way for someone who wouldn't pass a background check to buy a weapon. And I've never read of anyone being prosecuted for it, either.
The guy that killed the firefighters in Philadelphia is the best example of that, his niece bought the gun for him if I remember???? There were supposed to be charges against her, but not sure if they ever did.
No, but that could be because the provenance of the weapon is rarely mentioned, except in high profile mass shootings, like Columbine.
You have to wonder: if the Founding Fathers could have imagined events like Columbine, Sandy Hook, et al, would they have changed anything they wrote?
You think events like Columbine, Sandy Hook, et al, are modern day inventions? Interesting.
History of School Shootings in the United States | K12 Academics
On a completely unrelated side note... There were more mass shootings in the US in 1929 than there have been in the last 4 years combined.
History of School Shootings in the United States | K12 Academics
On a completely unrelated side note... There were more mass shootings in the US in 1929 than there have been in the last 4 years combined.
People are prosecuted all of the time for applying for gun purchases when they are ineligible, usually for lying or being convicted felons. Not all crimes make the paper or the Internet. I am a bail bondsman and have been since 1999, and this is not opinion. States like MD are even re-categorizing crimes from misdemeanors to felonies, post conviction, making those legally eligible to purchase weapons now ineligible. When they have legally purchased weapons, they are using the gun registration records to seize all of their weapons and charging them with felon in possession of a weapon, with the defendant never knowing their prior conviction was re-classified to a felony. One case I am familiar with was an over 46 year old misdemeanor in NY that was re-classified in MD, where the person lived for the last 34 years. The only way he was able to clear his name was to have the NY conviction over turned.
Yes, and your link proves it. Until 1966, every single school/student related shooting [with one exception] was a personal matter between the individuals involved. The exception was a 70 year old man who caused minor injuries, shooting at a playground full of children.
In August of 1966, Charles Whitman was the first shooter to target strangers, killing them.
1929 was part of the 'gangsters' era, [ie: the St Valentine's Day massacre] when gangs killed each other. As the title of my favorite book about Bugsy Siegel said: They Only Killed Each Other.
Can you cite or link something on that? All I can find goes the other way: reclassifying felonies to misdemeanors, post conviction.
So you think the four Lenape Indians all had individual personal matters with the nine or ten children they murdered. Interesting.
Well, except for all the other mass shootings where strangers died. Whitman may have been the first to have his shooting so closely tied to a school campus, but his was hardly the first indiscriminate mass shooting (spree, or rampage killings). In 1949 Charles Unruh killed 13 people, including 3 children, during a leisurely 12 minute walk through his neighborhood.
Mass Shootings Have Long History : DNews
Except they had a lot of collateral damage they weren't really concerned about and the mass killing numbers of the 20s,1929 in particular, do not include familial and felony murders of the gangster type of killings.
One reads those two quotes and might immediately think of the current climates in Chicago and Baltimore with the rising homicide rates among their black populations - especially the "gangstas" with their drug and turf wars. For the most part they're only killing each other. They say "Black Lives Matter" but nobody seems to care about these lives. Somebody once said "History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes". Regardless of whether you're talking about the 1920s or the present, it's the culture that's the cause of the criminality of the individuals - not the tools they use.
The ones who think that are the ones who are obsessed with black-on-black crime as their go-to tool for deflection and demonization particularly since the 1920s numbers and the Chicago and the Baltimore spree killing numbers explicitly exclude familial and gangster type (including gangsta type) shootings.
Oh, those obsessed with bringing up black-on-black crime care very deeply about the whole "Black Lives Matter" thing and the lives involved. They keep score and have a watchful eye on the scoreboard.
While I agree that the tools used is largely irrelevant, bringing this back to the topic at hand of spree killings that explicitly excludes familial and gangland killings, what is it about the culture that promotes or allows the (mostly white people to engage in the shootings of Columbine, Sandy Hook, the movie theaters and the malls? Since, you know, that is the discussion from which you yanked both of those quotes.