my ideas for gun control

[willie]

In years past I assisted a friend sell firearms at gun shows. He attended and worked about 20 gun shows per year and did so for 25 years. During this time he sold a very large number of rifles, handguns, and shotguns. He did not have an FFl. He asked no questions and would sell a firearm to any person that appeared to meet the age requirement. I have no doubt that my friend sold many guns to felons, gang members, and perhaps mentally incompetent individuals. The second amendment was not his concern. Making money was. Countless other gun show vendors practiced the same business model. I did not care either. Looking back, I realize that I was a willing participant in an irresponsible activity. Should the 1000's of individuals buying my friend's guns have been required to undergo background checks? How many felons and other unqualified people would have been denied? These types of questions require careful thought. I do not know the answer. The original poster expressed honest opinions and voiced personal concerns. I regret that some replies were worded harshly. If I had solutions to the problems facing us, I already would have stated them. We have intelligent men and women on the forum. Let's not stifle dialogue. Instead let's collaborate to reach a consensus that we can forward to congress members.

I agree wholeheartedly that we must fight tooth and nail to preserve our rights. I will repeat myself and say that I don't have answers. Right now we need to figure out what the questions are.

[JRB]

... Right now we need to figure out what the questions are.

The first two questions we need to ask:

Why have we divorced criminals from any responsibility for their actions?
If a felon tries to buy a gun he's committing a crime. If he buys a gun he's committing a crime. That's his actions and his responsibilities and he should pay the piper.
The sage wisdom that we cannot prevent everything should NOT have been allowed to swell into this cancer of assumed non-responsibility for these assholes actions.
Your friend, and you, bear no responsibility for the felonious actions of those people, if he was lied to and indeed sold a gun to a prohibited person, that's on the felon! Sadly the laws in many areas would see it differently and I cannot for the life of me figure out why they'd go after a gun seller and not the asshole with murder in his heart.
The reality is that if not your friend selling, it would have been some other way, some other person. Nothing stops a killer except being killed. The left just keeps pretending that denying millions of lawful people the means will magically prevent motivated killers from killing. That narrative needs to be attacked head-on.

Second, why the hell have we allowed ourselves to be manipulated to the same table, where we inevitably give up our rights one little piece at a time, when instead our 'negotiation' should be spearheading effective, efficient, and serious enforcement of the existing laws?

Laws without effective enforcement mean nothing to criminals but mean everything to the lawful.
If they're just trying to disarm us fully, we need to shift that narrative to make them honest about their intentions, and make the terrible outcomes of those goals very clear.

Yet we're happy to stick our fingers in front of the band saw over and over again, hoping they only choose to cut a little bit more off. Fuck that. And fuck anyone that accepts that as reasonable, or negotiation, because it emphatically is not.

[Darth_Uno]

But going back to what I said earlier, if we start putting violent criminal offenders in jail and leaving them there the overall homicide rate will go down.

That is a concrete result that we can point to and say we've made progress in this area overall gun violence is decreasing. We can also offer definitive proof that the real problem isn't guns it's violent criminal REPEAT offenders

Don’t we own a bigass island we can just ship them off to? All violent felons get a one way ticket on the first offense.

That would also allow you to study just how much of an impact removing them from the population would have on overall crime and “gun crime”.

[ssb]

We're absolutely not dismissive of that building momentum. The problem is that momentum has built up because of a combination of the media circuses, and their relentless, unreasonable, loud, 'fuck you I want more of your cake' approach to politics in general including anti-2A stuff.

Being unreasonable is the whole reason they've made this 'progress' against us. We keep pretending they're reasonable, or there's a way to reason with them, or a negotiation strategy, or something painless we can put in front of the band saw instead of something we care about - and it simply does not fucking exist.

Pretending it does only delays any effective response.

And so the effective response is...? Get up on TV, state that it isn't "the gun's" fault, point to mental health issues and failures to enforce existing laws, call the other side unreasonable and note their ulterior anti-gun motives, and hopefully ride out the mass shooting news cycle until it dies down?

Seems to be working splendidly thus far at the state level, as it will - I'm sure - in the 2020 legislative races. To his credit, Mitch McConnell has been pretty much the only thing that has managed to stop a lot of this at the federal level this past decade. He won't be around forever, and neither will all those procedural barriers in the Senate he's helped burn.

While ya'll keep sticking to this winning strategy, I'll be over here watching major CC companies, banks, and UPS/FedEx allow themselves to be convinced we hurt their bottom line more than we help it. That's the next step, mind you, regardless of what McConnell manages to block this fall.

[OlongJohnson]

Don’t we own a bigass island we can just ship them off to? All violent felons get a one way ticket on the first offense.

That would also allow you to study just how much of an impact removing them from the population would have on overall crime and “gun crime”.

We know how that ends. The violent felons' great grandchildren sell 30 percent of their guns back to the government for pennies on the dollar and the rest go into hiding.