Friday, January 20, 2012

Another Reason to Have Fewer Guns, Because Fewer Guns Equate to Fewer Crimes with Guns

This gun started out as legal.  Someone who bought it legally was careless in not researching who they traded it to or to whom they sold it. That legal buyer didn't care about anyone else who might end up on the wrong side of that gun, a victim of gun violence or the threat of gun violence.

It is this lack of care, this problem with legal guns becoming illegal guns, that proves our so-called law abiding gun owners aren't really very good about preventing their firearms from ending up in the hands of criminals.  Because they do not take the care and are not as responsible as they need to be voluntarily, we need regulation to penalize them for those deficiencies that harm us all.

We need the gun nuts to have some skin in the game, to have something on the line for what happens with their legal firearms when they become illegal firearms.

I favor regulation, licensing, and some form of bonding where they lose money if they transfer their legal firearm to a prohibited person, or if their firearm is used in the commission of a crime.

From MSNBC.com and news services:

Cops: Gunman robs choir group at church

Police in Goose Creek, S.C. say a man armed with a shotgun robbed a choir group as they practiced at a church.
According to WCSC in Charleston, authorities responded to the St. James United Methodist Church around 8 p.m. Wednesday after reports of an armed robbery.
One of the victims told police that a man entered the church through an unlocked door and aimed a shotgun toward the choir area, WCSC reports. According to the station, the suspect then told the choir to get on the floor and keep their heads down.
The robber made off with purses, wallets and cell phones from the choir members. No one was hurt, WSOC-TV reports.
Investigators say the suspect is a black male between 5'10" to 5'11 and 230 pounds.
The robber escaped on foot. Police are continuing the investigation.

9 comments:

  1. Doggone: “Because Fewer Guns Equates to Fewer Crimes with Guns”

    Kindof true for anything, isn’t it?

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  2. I believe every firearm transfer, whether private or otherwise, should have to clear a background check. If the person receiving the firearm cleared the background check, then the seller is in the clear no matter what the buyer does with the firearm after that. The only exception in my mind is if the seller had specific knowledge that the buyer intended to use the firearm to commit a crime. Going further is ridiculous. Oh, and a background check should be free and available via a toll-free telephone number and provide a go or no-go response within 5 minutes of placing the call.

    So let's look at dog gone's argument from another perspective. If someone buys your car and then purposely plows into a crowd of people, are you culpable? Of course not. If they steel your car and plow into a crowd of people are you culpable? Of course not. What if you left the keys in the ignition ... are you culpable then? A big fat NO. So why would firearms be any different?

    As for firearms owners getting "skin in the game", what makes you think they want more criminals running around with guns? The less guns criminals have, the better my chances of dying of old age. That is the skin that I have in this game of life.

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  3. More failure of gun control, since churches are typically "gun-free zones." And more silliness on your part, advocating that because a bad person did something wrong, good people must be punished.

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    Replies
    1. The problem with your over-simplicication is this. The good guys and the bad guys overlap. In many cases the bad guys are hidden among the good guys, until the moment they do something really bad and get caught. So, no, it's not a black and white deal like you keep saying, bad guys on one side do something wrong and the good guys on the other side pay for it.

      Proper gun control is needed to identify the bad guys. Why do you resist that so?

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    2. How will you identify the bad guys in advance? I resist gun control because it will affect far more good gun owners than bad. What you call proper gun control wouldn't identify anyone. It would just take guns away on the suspicions of those in power.

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  4. Greg Camp said...

    More failure of gun control, since churches are typically "gun-free zones." And more silliness on your part, advocating that because a bad person did something wrong, good people must be punished.

    Yeah, except that those 'good people' who put the guns in the hands of the worse guys just aren't all that good.

    But then you don't label things honestly do you?

    Like the idea that the Universal Human Rights Declaration has only influenced 'a few people'.

    Whenever the facts don't fit your ideology, YOU GC change the facts.

    You do it rather often.

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  5. Legislated gun free zone is robbed with a gun so your solution is to legislate more gun free zones?

    More gun control FAIL.

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  6. Capn Crunch said...
    Cap'n Crunch wrote
    I believe every firearm transfer, whether private or otherwise, should have to clear a background check. If the person receiving the firearm cleared the background check, then the seller is in the clear no matter what the buyer does with the firearm after that. The only exception in my mind is if the seller had specific knowledge that the buyer intended to use the firearm to commit a crime.


    Good for you Crunchie. That is all anyone can ask, except that I would include mandatory reporting of theft, and some form of fairly heavy duty security of that firearm - as distinct from leaving it loose in a kitchen drawer or hall closet.

    Then Crunchie writes, If someone buys your car and then purposely plows into a crowd of people, are you culpable?

    YES, if the person is selling their vehicle to someone who is a prohibited person-- say without insurance, a person who has lost their license for repeated drunk driving that killed someone, a child, etc. IF you can provide a similarly prohibited group of people for comparison, then yes, the original owner shares a moral and possibly legal liability for that particular transfer of ownership to those people who are legally prohibited from vehicle ownership.

    NO ONE here is suggesting penalizing anyone who transfers a firearm EXCEPT for a prohibited person.

    Make this a fair comparison. If you have a family member who is killed by a drunk driver, and the owner of the vehicle handed over their keys to that drunk driver - a kind of transfer - would you hold the original owner responsible in part for the accident?

    Damned straight that our law - and the original owner's insurance - would do so, and so they should.

    CC then writesAs for firearms owners getting "skin in the game", what makes you think they want more criminals running around with guns?

    The repeated instances of firearms being transferred with no checking whatsoever as to the new person being prohibited or not. We have people bragging about how they don't need to do so here, they just 'know'.

    They DON'T know anything without checking. They don't want to know. They fight anyone checking. Ditto any regulation about security when their firearm is unattended - which frankly includes when someone is asleep.

    Fine. But then let's all have them put up a bond instead, If they fuck up and someone is hurt or killed, they forfeit the bond. If they shoot a person, improperly, that person can be compensated from that bond.

    We have been reporting enough of those incidents here - the three year old shooting the five year old in Colorado, the 15 year old boy in Arkansas who just shot his 16 year old sister comes to mind as two examples in the past 69 days. I'd add to that the idiot in Utah who shot at a mouse in the kitchen gut shooting his roommmate in the adjoining bathroom. People on the receiving end of gun violence stupidity, carelessness, recklessness, and failure to secure firearms should face penalties, including financial ones, because clearly they don't currently have enough 'skin in the game' to pay attention.

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  7. Dog Gone,

    How about we demand a bond from voters to be paid to those who made different choices every time a politician screws up?

    You consistently misrepresent what I say. By good people, I was referring to the members of the choir, people who might have had the opportunity to return fire, not to the hypothetical fellow who sells shotguns out of the trunk of his car.

    By the way, you do know that you're theorizing without data with regard to the source of this thug's weapon, right? We don't know where he got it. If he stole it, that is an additional crime on his part, but regardless, he's the one who committed the robbery.

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