Gun registry?
Tracing and gathering data on stolen guns — like the handgun used in the shooting of NYPD Officer Dillon Stewart — should be easier and more public, Sen. Charles Schumer said Sunday.
Schumer also said the rest of the country should have a law, as New York does, requiring stolen guns to be reported to authorities and be available on a national database.
I don’t know that I have a problem with creating a database of stolen guns, seems like it would be a good means of getting folks their property back. However, once a database is in place, it’d probably be only a matter of time before all guns are required to be entered into the registry. More:
He [Schumer] said police can only “trace certain guns after a crime is committed” and called for traces on all reported stolen guns.
Why would they want to trace a gun before the crime is committed?
December 5th, 2005 at 2:05 pm
Dunno. Why don’t they just arrest those guys on the wanted poster when they take their photograph?
December 5th, 2005 at 2:14 pm
Let me see if I got this straight.
A person reports his gun stolen, and Schumer wants to be able to track that gun’s whereabouts as each of its subsequent gangbanger “owners” registers it with their local PD when they take possession of it.
Brilliant.
When a gun is reported stolen, the “trace” is complete – end of trail. Or so I would think.
The only thing I can think of is he wants to lock up people who have their guns stolen.
“What’s that, someone drove through your front door with a Suburban? And then cut your in-wall safe out of the wall with a Sawzall? And then used a blowtorch to open it? And then forced the trigger locks of with bolt cutters? Come with us. you’re under arrest for improper storage of a firearm.”
December 5th, 2005 at 5:39 pm
I wonder what percentage of stolen guns go unreported because they were stolen from someone who wasn’t supposed to have a gun in the first place? I’m sure your average criminal isn’t going to report to the police that his piece got swiped. And neither is any resident of such social hellholes as NYC, DC, or Chicago, if they didn’t have the proper permitage, because they don’t want to get arrested for having an unlicensed gun.
If the gun was stolen from someone who owned it legally, what exactly would a trace from there do? Determining who owned the gun every step of the way from factory to current owner isn’t going to do much except create busywork for the local ATF drones. Oh, and generate a list, if they keep it, of people who would be searched if the .gov every decided to take guns away completely.
December 5th, 2005 at 6:25 pm
Schumer wasn’t the only stupid politician spouting off on this:
quote——
“The National Rifle Association was in Mayor Bloomberg’s cross hairs yesterday as he blasted the group for putting guns ahead of the lives of cops and children.
“Fundamentally, if you want to solve the problem [of gun violence] it’s up to Congress, and Congress keeps getting rolled by the NRA,” the mayor said during his weekly WABC radio show.
“This is plain and simple, the NRA versus the lives of our children and our police officers,” he declared.”
unquote—–
http://www.nypost.com/news/regionalnews/58895.htm
NRA is EEEEVVVIIIILLLL! Imagine putting the right of the adults of the nation to protect themselves and their children when the police aren’t there to save them.
December 6th, 2005 at 2:58 pm
Wait, so you are telling me the federal overlords have been busy building a *cough* “deadbeat dad’s database” of every single person who is employed by anyone, whether or not they have kids, and have been busy bribing parents to apply socalist insecurety numbers to their kids hands or forehead at the time of birth, by offering them a small rebate every year on the amount of money they get stolen from them (AKA a tax break), yet they don’t have a nationwide database of stolen firearms to help solve crime cases and return stolen property back to their owners?
My only objections would be to make damn sure when someone enters in a number to check it against the list of stolen guns, that data should not be stored or retained. Back this up with a statute, that automatically de-funds the BATFE if they decide to “temporarily retain” the data on non-stolen guns “for testing purposes” or any such nonsense. I call this a legislative “shotgun” pointing directly at the “head” of the BATFE. The only way to trust such a powerful federal agency.
Ideally, this could be a web appliance. first you would navigate to a web page, and then enter in the serial number. That number would be matched against the database, and if (and only if) there was a match would it ask for the make and model to further narrow down the firearm as stolen or not. The IP addresses would only be retained for a short period, and only used if there was an attack by a horde of “zombies” (hijacked computers) for some reason.
Getting your congress-critter to understand such technical aspects would be quite a task, however.
December 7th, 2005 at 12:34 pm
I’ve got news for Chucky; there already IS a database for stolen firearms. NCIC (National Crime Information Center) has, among the other records, the Stolen Gun file. You report a firearm stolen to the police, they enter the make, model, serial # and so forth into the file.
The entering agency has to validate the record on a regular basis to make sure it’s still valid; unless they don’t validate it, or unless they clear or cancel the record, it’s there forever.
January 27th, 2006 at 10:09 am
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