#1 - it sounds like what you're looking for is expanded record-keeping (of private gun sales). Many states already have that. But there's another issue, and that is the fact that there are already a multitude of similar gun laws which aren't being enforced. For example, law enforcement is supposed to follow up any time someone fails the NICS background check. It doesn't happen. In Chicago, felons are frequently given light (or no) sentencing even when they've committed a crime using a gun.
So harsher enforcement of existing gun laws. Good, see things can be done to fix the problem.
You still haven't proven that our ideas won't fix the issue. How do you know for sure he would've passed a mental health check? As I said, healthy people don't create a plan to attempt to kill hundreds of people.
How do you know banning bump stocks wouldn't have stopped this specific shooting from being as bad? The guns were mounted to tripods, so control was not an issue.
I don't think
harsher punishments are necessary at this point. How about simply enforcing the law as written? Then, if it has a measurably positive effect, we can talk about adjusting the harshness of the penalties.
On the mental health check issue, you're asking me to prove a negative, or, perhaps more precisely, it's an
Argument_from_ignorance, so there's no reason to try. You are assuming that there's some sort of mental health test that he would fail, and asking me to prove your imaginary test ineffective.
But, to humor you with respect to the bumpfire stock: In this specific instance, the guy was capable of very thorough planning for his crime. He purchased a large number of weapons, mounted bipods/tripods to improve stability, selected a specific room to have the best vantage point, set up cameras so he could see the police coming, brought along significant stores of ammunition, etc. Compared with all that, the step of mounting a bump fire stock, or, if they're illegal, making his own method of inducing rapid fire (gatling crank, gatling glove, homemade bumpfire stock, simply training to do bumpfire without any equipment), doesn't seem like such a big deal.
Do you really not know the difficulty (and manpower costs) of wading through millions of paper (not digital) document held in thousands of locations that law enforcement must undertake to search these records, or are you being purposely dishonest with your response?
You also 'forgot' that 40% of gun sales in the US don't go through a dealer, they're part of those untracked private sales.
#1 - Yes. Expanded record keeping across the country, and limits to the numbers of guns that can be owned.
#2 - Sorry, I mean GPS not RFID. I build a lot of devices with tracking chips at work, they're not very expensive and would be pretty easy to set up for tracking. Even easier with limited numbers of firearms per person. Tremendous benefit from this . . . stolen weapons, hidden weapons, when police plan to raid a house they can get a good idea of what firearms are going to be in it before hand and will be able to reduce the force used, etc.
#3 - Ah. Moving goal posts. First you didn't want to talk about any crime but the one in the OP, now we don't want to talk about the shooting. I see how it is.
We might be talking about two different things. Why would anyone need to wade through a pile of paperwork? I'm thinking about a case where a bad guy does something bad with a gun and gets caught. The authorities don't have to wade through any large quantity of paperwork, they just follow the chain of custody for that serial number. If, of course, the criminal hasn't filed it off, in which case the database does you no good anyway. Am I misunderstanding what you're saying?
I didn't "forget" private sales. I was including them in my response to #1. Besides, this is another example of a mechanism that is seldom enforced and even more rarely used in solving a crime, and once again, becomes impotent once the serial number is filed off. It sounds effective in theory, but historically hasn't proven to have much (if any) effect.
GPS (not RFID): GPS is a battery hog. Are the cops going to come knock on gun owners' doors every time someone forgets to charge up their device? This sounds like a logistical nightmare. Also, a large number of guns used in crimes have been stolen (or "stolen"), and would likely have this device promptly disabled anyway.
#3 - you're right--I did move the goalposts. Thanks for pointing that out. :) The debate shifts between the two so fluidly, it's hard sometimes to keep up. I think it's also worth reiterating that this event is very much a black swan, and public policy is rarely well-served with a basis of such events, tragic as they may be.
WRT limiting the total number of guns a person can own, let's explore a bit more. Sure, a person with a pistol and a rifle is potentially more dangerous than someone with only one of them. But the guy with 50 guns isn't going to pose much more of a threat to the public than the guy with 10. And how do you set the limit? I can easily come up with a list of 10 guns I'd be interested in owning, without it seeming outlandish. A .22 rifle for plinking, a compact concealed carry pistol, a full-size pistol for the night stand, a shotgun for shooting clay pigeons, an AR-15, an M1 Garand (just because they're really cool), a carry pistol for DW, a bolt-action 30-06 or .308 for longer-range shooting, a smaller .22 bolt-action rifle for the kids to learn on, and a 20-gauge shotgun for the kids as well. How would such a limit work on households with multiple adults? Do you limit it by type of weapon?
-In USA, gun homicides ex gangs are about 2,000 per year, of which about 1,000 are by cops, the vast majority of which are justified. This leaves about 1,000 homicides per year, 3 per day, by non-gang civilians.
Good point. If we exclude all bullet deaths, we only have ~20* deaths per year from guns.
* A completely made up number but a lot of the "facts" in this thread are similarly made up or based on questionable studies.
He's not making up the statistics--those are straight from the FBI (albeit rounded a bunch), except I don't know about the "1,000 by police" number, which I'm not familiar with. I think part of the point is that discussions of gun control are centered around removing the "how" from the equation, without addressing what is the larger issue--the "why."
Your argument that gun control laws don't work because one man got around them is total bullshit. Since Jan 2013 there has been 1516 mass shootings in the US (population 323 million). Norway (population 5 million) should then proportionally and statically have had... 23.46. As far as I know (and I live in this region of the world, and regularly watch Norwegian telly - I haven't been able to find any statistics..) None.. Zip.. Nada... Anders Breivik's attack was in 2011, and totally skewed gun deaths statistics in Norway.
The "1516" number is utter hogwash. It was created by compiling every incident that could be interpreted to fit in a very broad classification of "mass shooting."