Firearms museum and reflecting pool? They might as well tell the truth and put “Altar to the Bloodthirsty God Sam Colt.”
Here’s why.
There hasn’t been a permanent ATF director for six years, since back in the Bush administration.
…
Obama has nominated a permanent director, but there hasn’t even been a hearing on the nomination because of opposition from the gun lobby.
There are other administrative issues: Funding has been relatively flat, and the agency has roughly the same number of agents today as it did a decade ago.
Then there are the issues ATF agents face with gun laws. Congress refuses to allow a centralized gun database, so tracing a weapon used in a crime means a lot of legwork, says former ATF agent William Vizzard.
…
Advocates also say the ATF should be allowed to inspect firearms dealers more than once a year, and that dealers should be required to keep track of their inventory.
The Brady Center’s Lowy says that more than 100,000 guns are missing from dealers’ shelves.
“There’s a great likelihood that most of those guns were sold off the books to criminals,” he says. “Easy way to fix that is to simply require dealers to do an inventory every year of their stock. ATF is prevented from even requiring dealers to do that. That makes absolutely no sense.”
Gun rights advocates say they are defending law-abiding dealers from overzealous government agents.
The ATF has been systematically gutted over the last decade or so. They can barely keep the lights on.
Houngan
1789
Well, that sucks. I can’t see any reason to restrict access to the information to law enforcement, except the identity of the final buyer. However, reading the article it seems like it’s the Brady Center that is making most of those claims. While I hate to play this card (and it so rarely can be played against the left) The Brady Center is deceptive on their best day, and outright mendacious most of the time. For instance:
“The restrictions on ATF are absurd,” says Jon Lowy of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. "They’re not allowed to use computers in doing their trace work. They’re not allowed to do more than one spot inspection on a gun dealer."
Wiki:
ATF’s Comprehensive Crime Gun Tracing Initiative is the largest operation of its kind in the world. In FY07, ATF’s National Tracing Center processed over 285,000 trace requests on guns for over 6,000 law enforcement agencies in 50 countries. ATF uses a Web-based system, known as eTrace, that provides law enforcement agencies with the capability to securely and electronically send trace requests, receive trace results, and conduct basic trace analysis in real time. Over 2,000 agencies and more than 17,000 individuals currently use eTrace, including over 33 foreign law enforcement agencies. Gun tracing provides information to Federal, State, local and foreign law enforcement agencies on the history of a firearm from the manufacturer (or importer), through the distribution chain, to the first retail purchaser. This information is used to link suspects to firearms in criminal investigations, identify potential traffickers, and detect in-state, interstate, and international patterns in the sources and types of crime guns.
As for the director, the current nominee is the ATF Chief in Chicago, which should tell anyone that is a reader of this thread exactly how effective an administrator he is.
But the idea of an ATF director who hails from Chicago, a city without gun shops, and who has conflated black market automatic weapons with legal semi-automatic “assault-style” rifles is causing Second Amendment defenders to worry that President Obama intends to blast away at gun rights by force of bureaucracy, if not law.
http://www.npr.org/2013/01/08/168889491/gun-control-advocates-say-atfs-hands-have-been-tied
Under his tenure Chicago has become the single most dangerous major city in the entire world while having a complete ban on firearms. He’s not a serious nominee, in other words. You might as well nominate Rupert Murdoch as head of the FCC.
Then put him up for a vote and nix him. Come on, the number of non-voted Obama nominees is an issue that goes well beyond gun control.
Houngan
1791
You’ll get no argument from me, but congressional dysfunction goes well beyond this thread’s scope.
This article is a few weeks old, but I don’t remember seeing it posted earlier in this thread. I was reminded of it by the discussion above about the ATF being limited in what they can do. In addition to funding and leadership issues, and craziness like the gun-show loophole, law enforcement is also limited by the data available to them.
Mental-Health Records Missing From Gun-Dealer Database
Despite recent progress in some states, millions of mental-health records remain missing from the national database that gun dealers use to run background checks on potential buyers, according to a new analysis of federal data by a coalition of U.S. mayors.
…
Just 12 states account for the vast majority of the mental-health records in the national database, the GAO found, “and most states have made little or no progress in providing these records.”
…
There is no federal law or regulation that tells states how often or in what form mental-health records should be submitted to the database, should a state choose to participate.
maxle
1793
I suppose that’s not impossible, but it sounds more than a little dubious. Do you have a source?
Sinij
1794
Houngan
1795
From this:
Though I’ve dug no further.
Houngan
1796
Man, I wish I only spent $564 a year.
Out of curiosity, I hit up Google News to see what evidence could be found of police shooting concealed carriers. The answer’s basically none—I tried a few search terms with results between 1/1/2000 and 1/1/2012 (to filter news items relating to the recent flare-up in the debate), and found no instances of concealed carriers who were shot by police (five pages into both regular Google results and Google News results) after having responded to a crime in progress. I found one instance in which a concealed carrier was shot by police in Las Vegas, after the police tapped him on the shoulder and he drew a gun.
“If we selectively ignore every city with a higher murder rate than Chicago’s, Chicago is the worst!”
Not that 19.4 murders per 100,000 doesn’t raise eyebrows. But without knowing the author’s criteria for “Alpha world cities,” as he puts it, I’ve no idea why Sao Paulo is on his list but Caracas (which he admits has a far worse murder rate) does not. I’m also inferring he’s talking total murders, not just murder-by-gun; would like to know what the breakout is.
That said, I agree with the assertion that strict local gun laws are almost meaningless when other states / municipalities are far more lax. I also agree that crushing urban poverty is a pretty big factor in violence (gun-related or otherwise). I just don’t think the author did a very good job of justifying his own points.
Houngan
1800
LMGTFY:
The bare minimum laws are background checks and selling only to in-state residents, that’s federal. Considering that 95% of Chicago’s gun murders are committed by a current felon with no access to legal firearms, it’s a question of what sort of laws will affect those who are already doubly prohibited.
Sinij
1801
Idea behind these types of arguments is that all guns started off as legal, and if you take steps to make legal gun owners responsible for illegal activities committed with their guns, then you will reduce availability of guns to criminal elements.
One proposed way to do this is gun insurance - with risk management practices putting pressure on individuals to demonstrate that they store guns safely and are justified in their choice of guns. Just like a car insurance for a Ferrari parked on the street is higher than insurance for a garaged Corolla, insurance for a poorly secured assault rifle will be higher than insurance for a stored-in-a-gun-safe hunting rifle.
Currently there is very little penalty ,outside of loss of gun’s value, for a negligent gun owner that allows his or her gun to fall into criminal hands.
Houngan
1802
Questions on gun insurance:
- How do you get around universal registration?
- Who pays when the crime committed, as in 85% of gun murders, is with an illegally held gun?
I’m admittedly not well-versed on this, but my assumption has always been that most illegal firearms in the US started as legal firearms or at least colorably legal (e.g., strawman sales) firearms.
I didn’t think guns were a major illegal import into the U.S., unlike cocaine for example. If anything, my understanding is that we ship a crap-ton of illegal guns down south. Further, guns aren’t as readily produceable illegally, like meth. Rather, they’re generally professionally-manufactured, precision instruments. Currently, I would think that there’s a major inter-state amount of gun movement in the states.
So, I think laws that would affect guns in the hands of felons would be things like requiring background checks on all transfers/sales. Registration, regular inventory control, etc. Things that manage the source of guns that ultimately make their way into the illegal stream.
Some of these issues, e.g., traceability, are exactly the kind of things that are affected by the data suppression issue that we’ve been discussing. I think it’s incredibly important for us to know where illegal firearms are coming from.
Quick side bar: I’m now getting banner ads offering to sell me gold bullion at the top of this thread!
Sinij
1805
You don’t - you register all legally owned guns and update this registry on a regular basis. Just like you register your cars.
- Who pays when the crime committed, as in 85% of gun murders, is with an illegally held gun?
Insurance of the last legal owner, with a sunset clause of ~5 years since reported stolen. Rest - by the victim fund that all insurers contribute small % of total insurance costs.
Houngan
1806
It is likely that they start legally since, well, they are legal. Outlaw them and this will change since there will be a compelling case for importation by the black market.
They’re somewhat professionally manufactured, and they aren’t consumable like meth, so it’s a different life cycle entirely. The junk guns used in most crime are anything but precision, but they’re still beyond the average hobbyist. Again, make them blanket-illegal and that will change.
Requiring background checks on all transfers does nothing, since it’s already required on all sales, and a transfer to a felon is just as illegal now as a transfer without a check would be after you passed that law. Full registration faces the same issue; they’re already breaking the law, why would they follow a new one? The only way to make something like that work is to allow for criminal and civil charges against the original purchaser or latest legal transferee for the gun’s entire lifecycle. Even allowing some sort of loss provision is a huge loophole that would be instantly exploited, and this is all predicated on the idea that you could pass mandatory registration with confiscation and criminal charges tacked on for the non-compliant.
As for tracing, we do know where they are coming from, the ATF maintains a database that is accessible to law enforcement. We know every step of the gun’s life, except the name of the final purchaser. I have no problem with inventory requirements and as we’ve discussed am in favor of storage requirements, but I think mandatory retroactive registration with penalties is a non-starter politically, and if you somehow managed to pass it would just serve to bring about the “only criminals will have guns” scenario.
