The issue with centrally registering guns is than when you country is taken over by hostile forces (whether an invading army or a democratically elected abuser who turns it into a dictatorship), they know who has the guns and can force those people to surrender them (politely at first, authoritarians always use a salami slicing technique).
The issue with no controls is that even anti-social and mentally ill people can get them.
I wonder if the right middle ground could be:
- Sellers have to do their due diligence - require ID, proof of psychological examination, whatever else is deemed the right balance.
- Not doing due diligence means they get punishment equal to that for any offense committed with that gun.
- They might be required to mark/stamp the gun so that it can be traced back to them or have witnesses for the transfer.
The first is the mentally ill. Intuitively it seems desirable to say that someone undergoing treatment for e.g. depression shouldn't buy a gun. The problem here is the massive perverse incentive. If you're pretty depressed but you're not inclined to forfeit your ability to buy firearms, you now have a significant incentive to avoid seeking treatment. At which point you can still buy a gun but now your mental illness is going untreated, which is very worse than where we started.
The second is career criminals, i.e. people who have already been convicted of a crime and want to commit another one. The problem here is that career criminals... don't follow laws. If they want a gun they steal one or recruit someone without a criminal record into their gang etc., both of which are actually worse than just letting them buy one.
On top of that, when people get caught, prosecutors generally try to get them to testify against other criminals in exchange for a deal, who are then going to be pretty mad at them. Which gives them a much higher than average legitimate need to exercise their right to self-defense once they get back out. And then you get three independent bad outcomes: If they can't defend themselves they get killed for snitching, if they acquire a gun anyway so they don't then they could go back to prison even if they were otherwise trying to reform themselves, and if they think about this ahead of time or are advised of it by their lawyers then they'll be less likely to cooperate with prosecutors because the other two scenarios that are both bad for them only happen if they snitch.
Meanwhile the proposal was only ever expected to address a minority of the problem to begin with because plenty of the people who do bad things can pass the background check. And if you have a policy that doesn't even solve most of the original problem while creating several new ones, maybe it's just a bad idea?
Are you saying everyone should be allowed to have a gun?
Because that's genuinely an interesting position. My proposal came from the view that if we need gun control, we should make sure it cannot be abused into a self reinforcing loop where a completely disarmed population is the end state (and possible end goal).
I would be interested if there is research into these indirect effects you talk about. For example I'd like to know how often people actually snitch, whether there are attempts/procedures to protect info about who snitched, how often they are killed for snitching, how often having a gun helps them, etc. E.g. because if a hit can come at any time from anywhere, having a gun might only give a feeling of safety.
We can probably make an exception for people who are currently in prison.
> I would be interested if there is research into these indirect effects you talk about.
This is a political question so all of the research is performed by partisans for one side or the other. On top of that, most of this stuff is inherently hard to measure, e.g.:
> For example I'd like to know how often people actually snitch, whether there are attempts/procedures to protect info about who snitched, how often they are killed for snitching, how often having a gun helps them, etc.
The government is going to try to avoid disclosing who snitches and the criminals are going to try to find out and retaliate. But if the criminals have a way of finding out (e.g. bribe the cops) then it will be illegal and no one will want to admit it's happening, and likewise if they successfully retaliate they'll want to do it a way that doesn't catch them a murder conviction.
So now someone few people are going to notice winds up dead. If they were an informant at some point in the past, those records are closely guarded for obvious reasons, so how is someone trying to collect statistics even supposed to know that? Likewise, if their death is made to look like an accident or the killer is never caught, how do you know how often it was actually an accident or an unrelated crime?
Which then leads into this:
> E.g. because if a hit can come at any time from anywhere, having a gun might only give a feeling of safety.
Part of the premise of having a weapon is as a deterrent, which gives you another measurement problem: If a lot of the snitches are keeping weapons even though they're not allowed to and that's successfully deterring anyone from trying to kill them, neither the snitches nor their hitmen are going to admit to either one because they're both breaking the law.
The lack of anybody having good numbers also feeds into the problem itself, because then the snitches have to guess whether it will help them and a lot of them are going to regard the risk of getting killed as a bigger threat than the risk of getting caught with a gun. Or worse, the hitmen will like their chances better when the law requires their target to be unarmed. And both of those happen stochastically as a result of the inherent uncertainty regardless of your own guess for how effective the victim having a weapon is at deterring retaliation.
The first is the deterrent to reporting, both before and after a conviction. In the original case the victim now can't even report a domestic misdemeanor in the subculture where gun ownership is sacrosanct because either they themselves consider "permanently can't own a gun" too severe a penalty for the crime they were trying to report, or they know the perpetrator will and they're afraid of being booted out into the street or worse if they do it. And for someone who already has a conviction but still has a gun, now the other people in the household can't be calling the police for any reason because if the police find the gun the person keeping a roof over their head is going to prison for years. In general you want the penalties for things to be proportionate and making them disproportionate makes things worse instead of better.
The second is that the victim, or any future victims, are living in the same household as the perpetrator, and then how do you answer this question: Is the victim now prohibited from having a firearm? You're screwed either way, because if you say no you're denying the innocent victim's right to self-defense but if you say yes the perpetrator now has an excuse to have them in the house.
Then these things combine poorly because the overconfident drunk who wants a gun is willing to bet they can convince anyone it belongs to their sweetheart but the sweetheart is nowhere near as confident they can control what happens if they call the police.
convicted in any court of a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year;
who is a fugitive from justice;
who is an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance (as defined in section 102 of the Controlled Substances Act, codified at 21 U.S.C. § 802);
who has been adjudicated as a mental defective or has been committed to any mental institution;
who is an illegal alien;
who has been discharged from the Armed Forces under dishonorable conditions;
who has renounced his or her United States citizenship;
who is subject to a court order restraining the person from harassing, stalking, or threatening an intimate partner or child of the intimate partner;
or who has been convicted of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence.
Nitpick but violence is not wrong on its own. Self defense is also violence and should not prevent your from having a gun for next time. Defense of others or reasonable defense of property likewise.
Forcibly removing a person from power who has gained or maintained that power without consent of those he has power over is also violence and even most current states allow us to celebrate it (usually as long as we don't argue it should be repeated against the current government).
Occasionally, gun owners are THE hostile force buying guns explicifely to bully and threaten. But that is about it, really.
