No, but they also didn’t report the attempted felonies to police, nor did they actually verify that the people they identified as having the same name as felons were actually those felons.
“Hey, look! This guy’s name is Michael Smith! Here’s a guy in the VT Criminal database named Michael Smith! CHALK UP ANOTHER ONE!”
There should be a website, where citizens can check the ID of anyone else, and verify whether they are US citizens, and whether they have been convicted of a felony that would prohibit them from buying a firearm.
Of course, politicians and liberals would PSH-freak out, if such a thing came to pass. Can’t have people checking the records of pols and their families, or screening job applicants, renters, potential bosses…
Many years ago during the fight leading up to the original Brady Bill, Neal Knox suggested a compromise that might just be useful today. He had the idea that background checks could be done for everyone ahead of time and those who were determined to be prohibited persons would receive a bright orange drivers license. Of course everyone who saw their license would know that they were a convicted felon especially cops. All firearms buyers would need to produce their drivers license to purchase a gun and a bright orange license would mean no sale. Maybe we should try this today.
Sure that could work, but if you want to make it generally useful (and with all the levels of criminals today) you would need a whole bunch of different colors. You’d need colors for violent felons, white collar fraud, illegal substance trafficking and probably a dozen others. A company might be wiling to hire a small time druggy, but not a known fraudster, for example. And of course this would not prevent real criminals from arming themselves, since even today it is trivially easy to get a fake ID.
I think a better solution is to just open up NICS to everyone, and tailor it to be general purpose, having it return a list of public record info on the person you are looking up (such as a general list of convictions: convicted of fraud in 1996, assault in 1998 etc.). Of course you will need a way to help narrow down ID on common names, without having to give out a whole bunch of confidential information, and that could be hard to be figured out. . .
great idea, but why not have multi-colored badges for people to wear for everyone to see? then we can assign different badges to different categories of people, depending on where they are in the pecking order. amazing that no one has tried this before.
January 25th, 2015 at 5:33 pm
No, but they also didn’t report the attempted felonies to police, nor did they actually verify that the people they identified as having the same name as felons were actually those felons.
“Hey, look! This guy’s name is Michael Smith! Here’s a guy in the VT Criminal database named Michael Smith! CHALK UP ANOTHER ONE!”
January 25th, 2015 at 6:16 pm
Bloomberg needs to listen to Zoidberg.
January 25th, 2015 at 7:06 pm
There should be a website, where citizens can check the ID of anyone else, and verify whether they are US citizens, and whether they have been convicted of a felony that would prohibit them from buying a firearm.
Of course, politicians and liberals would PSH-freak out, if such a thing came to pass. Can’t have people checking the records of pols and their families, or screening job applicants, renters, potential bosses…
January 25th, 2015 at 9:15 pm
Many years ago during the fight leading up to the original Brady Bill, Neal Knox suggested a compromise that might just be useful today. He had the idea that background checks could be done for everyone ahead of time and those who were determined to be prohibited persons would receive a bright orange drivers license. Of course everyone who saw their license would know that they were a convicted felon especially cops. All firearms buyers would need to produce their drivers license to purchase a gun and a bright orange license would mean no sale. Maybe we should try this today.
January 25th, 2015 at 10:06 pm
@ Mike
Sure that could work, but if you want to make it generally useful (and with all the levels of criminals today) you would need a whole bunch of different colors. You’d need colors for violent felons, white collar fraud, illegal substance trafficking and probably a dozen others. A company might be wiling to hire a small time druggy, but not a known fraudster, for example. And of course this would not prevent real criminals from arming themselves, since even today it is trivially easy to get a fake ID.
I think a better solution is to just open up NICS to everyone, and tailor it to be general purpose, having it return a list of public record info on the person you are looking up (such as a general list of convictions: convicted of fraud in 1996, assault in 1998 etc.). Of course you will need a way to help narrow down ID on common names, without having to give out a whole bunch of confidential information, and that could be hard to be figured out. . .
January 26th, 2015 at 2:12 pm
@ mike
great idea, but why not have multi-colored badges for people to wear for everyone to see? then we can assign different badges to different categories of people, depending on where they are in the pecking order. amazing that no one has tried this before.
January 26th, 2015 at 5:04 pm
I kind of want that Glock 40mm alluded to in the article.