Pirate's Cove

An interesting, and long, long take on the issue by Jon Stokes

A Gun Nut’s Guide to Gun Control That Works

I am a gun industry insider, a lifelong gun owner and a vocal advocate for Second Amendment rights. I am a Texan and an American patriot who hauls my family to church every Sunday in a diesel pickup truck, where I sit in the pew and listen to the Word with a 9mm pistol tucked inside the waistband of my fanciest jeans.

Isn’t this the part where the author inserts the inevitable “but”—as in, “I’m a firm Second Amendment advocate, but … ”? Well I’ve got no “buts” for you, because I don’t need them. I believe there is a way to increase both our individual gun rights and our collective safety, if we can only get gun controllers to quit bitterly clinging to outmoded feature bans and gun registries, and convince gun rights advocates that “liberty” isn’t just about “what’s in my gun safe” but also about being able to exercise one’s full spectrum of Second Amendment rights in every part of this great nation.

The idea is simple but powerful: a federally issued license for simple possession of all semi-automatic firearms. This license would allow us to carefully vet civilian access to semi-automatic weapons, while overriding state-specific weapon bans and eliminating some of the federal paperwork that ties specific firearms to specific owners.

I offer this idea not only because I actually want to live in a world where it, or something like it, is the law of the land, but also because I and my fellow gun nuts are worried that a storm is coming that will sweep away a substantial portion of our gun rights without really making the country safer in return. We’re not even five months into a midterm election year, and 2018 has seen a string of high-profile incidents that have darkened the public’s view of civilian gun ownership: February’s massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, followed by this month’s shootings at YouTube headquarters in San Bruno, California, and at a Waffle House in Nashville, Tennessee. In the aftermath of these killings, we’re hearing proposals for anti-gun measures that we thought were widely considered out of bounds in the gun control debate, like a ban on all semi-automatic firearms, a repeal of the Second Amendment, or even an outright ban on the private ownership of guns. Some of us think this will all blow over, as it always does. And maybe it will. But this time definitely feels different.

Mr. Stokes knows gun rights supporters will object, but makes a reasonable, rational case for his idea. I won’t take away all his thunder, the entire article should be read in full. But, let’s see part of his plan

A federal license for all semi-automatic firearms would rest on two simple and well-defined concepts, one technical and one legal:

1) A “semi-automatic” firearm is one that fires a single round for each pull of the trigger, automatically reloading in between each shot until the ammo is depleted.

2) “Possession” is a legal concept from the drug war that implies that a person has a contraband item “on or about one’s person,” or has “control” over the item, perhaps by having it in a motor vehicle or in a home.

Because both of these things—“possession” and “semi-automatic weapons”—are easy to define, they’re easy to regulate.

Combine these two concepts with a thorough but reasonable vetting process, and you have the makings of a straightforward, effective system for keeping the most lethal class of weapons out of the hands of bad actors, while simultaneously lifting the burden of arbitrary weapon bans and federal red tape from law-abiding gun owners.

One big thing I have a problem with here is making this about semi-automatic firearms (which he sort of touches on later). If it’s going to be done, it should be on all firearms in an attempt to keep them out of criminal hands. Second, Mr. Stokes notes that once licensed, one can pretty much buy a gun at any time. He does note that the details need to be worked out, and, in my opinion, one of those details is how the permit gets revoked when it should get revoked. If your permit was fine for years, then you had a domestic violence restraining order initiated, what happens next? In a proper world, you’d have the permit revoked immediately by a judge, and be required to turn in all firearms temporarily.

Stokes also takes on the notion of giving all this information to government. Well, they already have it. So does Google, Facebook, and so many other private sites. The IRS, SS admin, etc, have tons of info on you. People give it up voluntarily. They write it all over the ‘net. Many big time gun supporters are putting their purchased firearms on their blogs.

Here’s another problem, as put forth by Cameron Smith

“I’ll give you my gun when you take it from my cold, dead hands.” The slogan popularized by National Rifle Association (NRA) bumper stickers has been a rallying cry for gun owners over the last several decades. It reflects the sentiment that too many politicians don’t respect the individual right to gun ownership ensconced in the Constitution. The challenge for most of gun owners is that amending gun policies isn’t usually a give-and-take issue. It’s often a take-and-take scenario facing even those of us willing to discuss policy reforms in good faith.

In this, if we give the gun grabbers a permit system, they’ll use it too find a way to grab more guns, to deny more people, and to push for more and more regulations. They just won’t stop.