RE: Mikkj/Spall/Gun Control.
Why would "law-abiding" citizens be "discouraged" from buying guns?
Any law or regulation regarding the legal sale of guns discourages law-abiding citizens from going through with the purchase. Paperwork, fees, etc.
My question to you is, this same government that has done such a darn good job of regulating the sale of mind-altering substances, this is the same government that you expect to do a good job or regulating the sale of guns. Why is it that everytime the government tries to regulate something like this, it ends up hurting the law abiding citizens and in no way hurts the criminal element?
"The fact that every other attempt at registration has led to confiscation."
I don't remember that happening here. Could you please enlighten me as to WHEN this occured?
I gave two examples of this happening here: California and New York.
Here is what I posted previously:
In New York, people were required to register all their rifles and shotguns. No problems, until the state government passed an "assault weapons" ban. Suddenly, registered owners were receiving letters telling them that they had a short time limit to choose between a) turning their expensive weapons over to the police for a pittance, b) selling or storing the weapon out of the state (Selling the weapon, however, might run afoul of certain federal regulations.) or c) prove that they have rendered it permanently non-functional, by, for example, having it welded shut.
The second example was in California, where they placed a time limit on registering "assault weapons" that was too short to complete the process, turning tens of thousands of owners into felons (which would cost them the right to own any guns, vote, and a host of other penalties). The Attorney General said that the deadline would not be enforced and that he would allow registrations to continue, and then turned around and retroactively said that the original deadline would be held to, and that anyone who registered after that date had to dispose of their weapon or be prosecuted.
The California situation was compounded by the fact that they were unclear as to which models of firearms were actually considered "assault weapons" and the AG's office started playing games with that list, telling owners of a certain kind of SKS rifle that they did not have to register, then, once the deadline was passed, reversing the decision to say that the weapon was indeed covered by the definition. The lawsuits are still in progress.
I guess that pesky old 2nd amendment will just dissapear, and all our citizenry roll over an play dead, right?
The Second Amendment has already disappeared, along with the Tenth Amendment and any other Amendment which we care to discuss. As we have already established on these boards, the Constitution itself is meaningless. It is an outdated document which holds no value, other than an interesting history lesson.
Why bother amending it when we can just ignore it?
Read the study, THEN comment. It clearly shows that in cities with unregistered guns, the amount of crime commited with LEGAL guns is FAR higher than those with registration.
I have not yet had time to research this study, but here is what I have found so far from a preliminary search:
This latest "research" from Hopkins, a study of licensing and registration laws, uses tracing data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms (BATF) in an attempt to support its conclusion that licensing and registration schemes are effective methods for keeping firearms out of the hands of criminals.
However, BATF tracing data have been proven to be worthless for such research. In 1992, the bipartisan Congressional Research Service informed Congress that the BATF tracing system is
"designed to help law enforcement agencies identify the ownership path of individual firearms. It was not designed to collect statistics.... Firearms selected for tracing do not constitute a random sample and cannot be considered representative of the larger universe of all firearms used by criminals, or of any subset of that universe. As a result, data from the tracing system may not be appropriate for drawing inferences...."
BATF even acknowledges that it "does not always know if a firearm being traced has been used in a crime." In other words, the foundation of the "research" roduced by Hopkins and praised by Barnes (and paid for through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention with your tax dollars) is completely worthless.
Of course, what more could we expect from Barnes, who earlier this year fabricated a Supreme Court quote and grossly exaggerated the number of firearm-related fatalities involving children when testifying before Congress?
More to come...
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