The FAST Approaching Gun Ban

[Caleigh]

Can we not just tax the hell out of guns and especially ammunition so that it will pay for all the cost of worrying about those guns and their potential damage? Pay for all the policing needed around them, all the property damage, the loss of human lives etc. I especially think it should be on ammunition though. A gun is just a sculpture if it has no bullets.

[Caleigh]

In Canada if you own a gun it MUST be kept in a locked container anywhere but at the range. And you have to provide to the local police precinct a set of instructions so that they can walk into your house and find your gun using those instructions.

[trish]

Can we not just tax the hell out of guns and especially ammunition so that it will pay for all the cost of worrying about those guns and their potential damage? Pay for all the policing needed around them, all the property damage, the loss of human lives etc. I especially think it should be on ammunition though. A gun is just a sculpture if it has no bullets.

Guns don't kill people, bullets do. Yeah...it's got a ring to it.

[trish]

http://articles.latimes.com/2013/feb...hield-20130205

[broncofan]

PLCAA advocates argue that this law only prevents frivolous lawsuits. But it is difficult to know what is frivolous on the fringes until something is litigated under common law principles of negligence and strict liability. Every other industry has to pay for legal representation for both frivolous lawsuits and lawsuits that make it to trial but are not successful. It's a cost of doing business, encourages caution, and laws that prevent frivolous lawsuits often pre-empt legitimate lawsuits.

http://articles.latimes.com/1994-05-...-manufacturers

I like this article by Chemerinsky long before PLCAA that explains what the development of the common law might do for gun safety in design and distribution (and also prices of weapons).

[buttslinger]

I'm not positive about the statistics, but I think there are more firearm murders in Chicago in three weeks than there are in Japan for the whole year. There's something more rotten in Denmark (the USA) than the NRA. There a cultural phenomenon going on here. No matter what you do about registration, or gun locks or safety measures, there are still 300 million guns floating around.
I do think that if a "gang of eight" type committee actually sat down and could spend a few weeks brainstorming all the stats they could come up with the most reasonable and effective measures to bring these staggering statistics down, but then you'd have to actually implement the measures, in accordance with the second amendment. In the case of Badger Guns, which recently lost a six million dollar lawsuit, they had a recorded tape of the salesman telling the guy to uncheck the box on the background check that said "I'm buying this gun for someone else" ....
Making this a cultural war against the rednecks in the NRA is a mistake, IMO, Fox News always points out that the perps in Trish and Martin's news accounts are Hispanic gangbangers. I have no idea why the LAW AND ORDER people don't want to clamp down on the relatively small number of gun dealers that are knowingly arming street trash. Instead of Rachel Maddow leading the charge you should have Tom Selleck.

[trish]

Asking for reasonable regulation is not "making this a cultural war," it is simply asking for more reasonable legislation. Spinning this simple plea as if it were a "war against rednecks" and making sure that in almost every post you characterize firearms abusers as "gangbangers" (whether you mean it or not) does reduce the issue to a culture war. This is what Fox News does. We don't have to accept their framing of the issue. It's not the children of gangbangers who are picking up their mommy's or their daddy's guns and accidentally shooting their toddler siblings.

Yes, I agree. It would be nice if some significant conservative politician would take up the issue and lead the charge. But because the extreme right wing, the tea party, the NRA and Fox News have made this into a culture war, no conservative politician can afford to champion the reasonable view. Any celeb who took up the cause -including Tom Selleck- would quickly be ridiculed by right wing media and threatened by anonymous, irate, internet "commentators".

Chicago marks the confluence of two incoming rivers of firearms; firearms from Wisconsin and Indiana. Are Chicagoans culturally inclined toward violence; or when a Chicagoan reaches the end of his rope -as happens to people regardless of their location- and he reaches for a something on which to take out his frustration, is it just more likely that the thing he grasps will be a gun? A gun in the home -no matter where that home is- significantly increases the probability of homicide or a suicide occurring in that home. Still the per capita rate of gun related deaths in Chicago has gone down since firearms have undergone somewhat stricter control there.

The U.S. city with the highest per capita homicide rate is St. Louis. Next is Detroit. Then Baltimore. This may suggest that factors that influence the per capita rate of homicide include not only the availability of guns but poverty, unemployment and systemic politico-economic divides.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...by_murder_rate

[fred41]

Here are some modern safety ideas...(I copied and pasted them from a person commenting one of the news articles about the "Badger Guns" case)
http://www.intelligun.com/
http://www.wired.com/2014/05/sentinl-gun-lock/

...of course I am posting this with the realization that many gun owners don't even consider using basic, old trigger locks that have been around practically forever.



..but the first of the two (as long as it works) doesn't seem to hamper using the weapon in immediate self defense.

[trish]

I would agree that "smart" guns of various sorts make a lot of sense; especially if you really want to keep a gun in the home because you feel insecure. I think it would likely diminish the chance of it being used by another family member in a moment of rage, or depression or just plain stupidity.

Others apparently don't agree. Remember back in May of 2014 when Andy Raymond -a gun dealer in Rockville, Maryland- decided to sell smart guns in his store alongside his usual assortment of firearms? He was hassled, his life was threatened and his family threatened to the point where he felt he had to back down and no longer offer them for sale. This incident was complicated by the fact that the governor promised to sign legislation that would make all other firearms illegal in Maryland should a smart gun become available. However, same thing happen to Belinda Padilla -a gun dealer in California, which had no such mandate complicating the issue. Belinda marketed smart guns in LA and was subject to endless harassment and threats to her life.

Gun enthusiasts opposed to the marketing of smart guns and biometric firearms will tell you they are the first step in a slippery slope to government regulation of firearms, the dissolution of the 2nd Amendment and the banishing of firearms. Of course slippery slope arguments are a logical fallacy and they can always be argued in both directions. E.g. I think once we are convinced that biometrics make a gun safer, we'll realize they can be used to make other weapons safe for civilian use too, for example: grenade launchers and shoulder launched missiles for starters. So how about it, NRA? Let's get behind this biometric thing. It'll be a boon for our 2nd Amendment Rights.

[fred41]

Yes Trish, I believe you have posted about that issue at the time...and I would like to say ' you can't stop progress (technology)'...and that's often true...but you can sure as hell slow it down. Patents for devices like that go back quite a ways. Putting in bills about smart gun technology before they were actively marketed is political grandstanding ...and only aggravated this issue, but over the top gun enthusiasts, just like like most OCD hoarders, are tone deaf to anything that might threaten their amassed collection.
The argument they make about retro fitting older weapons won't wash the longer and cheaper this technology sticks around...but we'll probably all be dead from old age before we see most weapons with this. A horse can't win a race if it isn't allowed to come out of the gate.