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?
You appear to have no idea how a weapons trace actually takes place in the US.
http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-how-cops-actually-trace-a-gun-2016-8"There is no national database of guns. We have no centralized record of who owns all the firearms we so vigorously debate, no hard data regarding how many people own them, how many of them are bought or sold, or how many even exist."
"Anytime a cop in any jurisdiction in America wants to connect a gun to its owner, the request for help ends up here, at the National Tracing Center, in a low, flat, boring building that belies its past as an IRS facility, just off state highway 9 in Martinsburg, West Virginia, in the eastern panhandle of the state, a town of some 17,000 people, a Walmart, a JCPenney, and various dollar stores sucking the life out of a quaint redbrick downtown. On any given day, agents here are running about 1,500 traces; they do about 370,000 a year."
"“It's a shoestring budget,” says Charlie, who runs the center. “It's not 10,000 agents and a big sophisticated place. It's a bunch of friggin' boxes. All half-ass records. We have about 50 ATF employees. And all the rest are basically the ladies. The ladies that live in West Virginia—and they got a job. There's a huge amount of labor being put into looking through microfilm.”
I want to ask about the microfilm—microfilm?—but it's hard to get a word in. He's already gone three rounds on the whiteboard, scribbling, erasing, illustrating some of the finer points of gun tracing, of which there are many, in large part due to the limitations imposed upon this place. For example, no computer. The National Tracing Center is not allowed to have centralized computer data.
“That's the big no-no,” says Charlie.
That's been a federal law, thanks to the NRA, since 1986: No searchable database of America's gun owners. So people here have to use paper, sort through enormous stacks of forms and record books that gun stores are required to keep and to eventually turn over to the feds when requested. It's kind of like a library in the old days—but without the card catalog. They can use pictures of paper, like microfilm (they recently got the go-ahead to convert the microfilm to PDFs), as long as the pictures of paper are not searchable. You have to flip through and read. No searching by gun owner. No searching by name."
"“You want to see the loading dock?” We head down a corridor lined with boxes. Every corridor in the whole place is lined with boxes, boxes up to the eyeballs. In the loading dock, there's a forklift beeping, bringing in more boxes. “You go, ‘Whoa!’ ” he says. “Okay? Yeah, but a million a month?” Almost 2 million new gun records every month he has to figure out what to do with. Almost 2 million slips of paper that record the sale of a gun—who bought it and where—like a glorified receipt. If you take pictures of the gun records, you can save space. “Two million images! You know, it's 2 million photo shots. I've got to have at least seven machines running 16 hours a day, or otherwise, right? I fall behind. And to fall behind means that instead of 5,000 boxes in process, there's maybe 5,500 tomorrow, you know?"
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.
If you didn't forget 'em, then you know full well that there is no existing mechanism or way for police to trace the 40% of gun sales in the country that take place this way.
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.
If people can figure out how to charge their cell in the morning, I think they can figure out how to charge their gun too. If not . . . they may well be too stupid to responsibly own a gun, so this seems like a win-win really.
Will there be logistical challenges? Sure. It might even make it slightly more little inconvenient to own a weapon. There will be a greater need for additional policing, especially at implementation. It will make things much safer though.
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?
How about limiting it to two firearms per adult? One per hand. You can own the guns you really want, but not the whole armory.