Social credit in America - Politics invades personal finance

What’s the plan for medical decisions when you are incapacitated? The plan can be literally anything, from having your spouse check on the guns, to hiring someone, to chosing to store them somewhere that takes the responsibility as part of the deal. Its only difficult when you don’t want to be bothered. And if you don’t want to be bothered to ensure your gun remains secure, you should probably reconsider owning a gun altogether.

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In other words, you don’t have a solution. The reality is that sometimes there is no way to prepare for a problem.

No, there isn’t “a” solution. I gave three solutions out of an infinite number of options.

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You provided one solution that will work for some people. The other two require you to trust an outside agency–and note that an awful lot of thefts are insider jobs. Thus I consider your other two non-starters.

So? That outside agency has still assumed the responsiblity for keeping track of that gun. The potential liability, should it’s theft not be discovered and reported within the given timeframe, is no longer your problem, it’s theirs. Remember, this isnt about preventing it from being stolen, it’s merely about learning that it has been stolen and reporting the theft in a timely manner.

I cant understand your obsession that there must be one solution that works for everyone, or it means there is no solution for anyone. You either take the responsibility that comes with gun ownership and figure out whatever solution works for your individual circumstances, or you decline the responsibility of gun ownership and you buy video games instead of a gun.

It’s mindblowing that anyone could possibly object to the notion that if you chose to own a deadly weapon, then you need to verify that weapon is still where you think it is every couple months. Let alone believe that such a requirement is somehow too difficult to follow.

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I’m fine with a general expectation that you should know where it is, but I object to making it an absolute standard.

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And we’re back to wanting to shirk personal responsibility in favor of facilitating letting guns get in the hands of criminals. Then insist that banning the guns is the only solution to gun-related crime, rather than admit we’re causing a lot of the problem by not wanting to be responsible for our own negligence.

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Okay, I’m short on time, but will try to climb on your (seemingly high) horse. Since you’ve so eloquently, or at least in English, identified the target … Have you registered your knives yet? Do you perform 30, 60, 90 - day checks on your kitchen knives, steak knives, forks, screwdrivers, awls, ice picks, carpet knives, box cutters, lawnmowers, tillers, disc harrows, other tools that I’ve run out of time to think of?

When you do, I will consider:

  1. identifying you as an idiot (no blood, no foul) :slight_smile:
  2. agreeing to your seemingly idiotic rules
  3. both
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Really? Wow! Okay, Crisco Kid, tell me the location of the Old-Timer that your grandpa, father, uncle, (hopefully) somebody gave you 50 years ago. You don’t know? Then bend over and grab your ankles. You’re a criminal.

Sorry for the poor editing/spelling, but gotta go.

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How could you leave out axes and chainsaws? :wink:

Is anyone anywhere demanding that the only reasonable solution is for those items to be banned, so that criminals cannot use them to commit crimes? And is anyone using a constitutional argument to oppose a ban of such items?

Only if someone steals it and commits a crime with it. I’m pretty sure that in most cases, any theft of such a 100 year old gun would be to add it to a collection, not use it to rob a bank. Even though such scenarios are the common means of criminals obtaining the guns they use to commit crimes, they represent a pretty small fraction of total [legal] gun ownership - a significant majority of gun owners could still ignore their collection for decades and suffer no adverse consequences, should they chose to just play the odds and accept the risk. This isnt attacking legal gun owners like you seem to think, it’s attacking criminals with illegal guns, then tracing their source of that gun. It’s sole purpose is to prevent said source of the gun from retroactively claiming it must’ve been stolen once they see they could be in trouble.

But what do I know, maybe it is best to just ban the legally owned guns, since it’d promote social equality and justice by primarily screwing [often older white male] responsible gun owners, while protecting the irresponsible people from themselves and leaving those poor criminals alone…

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That’s why I suggested the state appropriate some money towards it so the departments can charge the state and not the gun owner. It isn’t that common, so it wouldn’t cost much.

Do you remember where this started? We are all against gun crime. The left wants more gun laws aimed at law abiding gun owners to stop gun crime. The right thinks there are plenty of gun laws on the books, they just need to be enforced. Specifically the straw purchasing law.

That law is really hard to enforce because it involves proving something no one would admit to and can easily be explained away by theft. The moment someone finds out they are about to be charged with a crime if they don’t report something stolen, they report that thing stolen. You have to have a time limit on that report, or the crime becomes extremely hard to prove (when people aren’t dumb enough to use traceable means for payment).

Some of us on the right, in an effort to stop gun crime AND stop terrible laws from the left, think it is worth it to make some laws to help prosecute straw purchasers because the number of responsible gun owners that would potentially get caught up in that dragnet is essentially zero. Who would get in trouble? This is how many things would have to happen:

  • Person legally buys a gun
  • Person stores their gun on their property
  • Criminal with no relation to the person whatsoever breaks into property and steals gun
  • Criminal uses gun in a crime
  • Criminal is caught and gun is recovered
  • Police trace gun to who purchased it
  • 60-90 day pass from the time the crime occurs
  • Police figure out person and criminal have no connection
  • Person who bought the gun STILL has no idea his gun is not in his possession or on his property
  • Police talk to person and ask, “hey where’s your gun?”
  • Person answers, “I left it at my house that I haven’t visited in over 60-90 days.”
  • Police arrest person for failure to report gun stolen in a timely manner.

That person isn’t a straw purchaser. But is that person a responsible gun owner? He made no effort for 2-3 months to make sure his guns were where he left them. All we’re asking is, “make an effort.” You can forget about it and wait until day 59 if you really want to. If you are so worried about your guns being stolen that you can trust anyone else to swing by your house and see if they are all there, then you’re either a huge jerk with no friends, or you’re paranoid. It’s not illegal to be a loser or paranoid. But if you are, then solution is to carry YOURSELF to your property and inventory your own guns. Sorry you’re slightly inconvenienced because you like to store guns are your vacation home, but that inconvenience is worth it for society if it means we can actually lock up straw purchasers.

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Ok, I’ve got a pretty decent collection of guns.

My dad (old timer) was an avid big game Hunter. When he died I inherited that large collection of guns. My 2 sons (also hunt), have borrowed or taken those various weapons to use. So I’m not sure :thinking: exactly where those guns are stashed at the moment.

My husband’s arsenal is in our home along with the leftover old timers guns. So I suppose if someone were to rob our house (if they could bypass our loving German Shepherds) I would be in trouble with the law.

I’m not going to add this problem to my “worry list”. :blush:

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Interesting point. But here’s why I’m not worried. I never proposed a law that would require the purchaser of the gun, if he no longer owns the gun, to disclose to the police who he gave/sold it to. The only national record of gun “possession” the Feds have access to is the form filled out by the FFL that notes the serial number and the person buying the gun from the FFL. In the scenario I just listed, if the buyer of the gun legitimately sold or gave away the gun prior to it being stolen, that’s the end of the chain of events and he didn’t break the law. If he voluntarily tells the police who he gave/sold it to, the police could follow up on that lead and see if that person broke the law. If he refuses to tell the police who he gave/sold it to, the case just sort of dies.

If this “loophole” becomes a serious impediment to prosecuting straw purchasers, THEN we can (and maybe should) consider a universal background check law that would allow the police to see who bought the gun and investigate how it got from that person to the criminal. But I would think that might not be necessary, so I would like to see some data first.

You would most likely not be in trouble based on the scenario I just laid out if my suggestion were to become law. But if you chose to do the right thing, it would be pretty simple.

  • Note all the serial numbers of your guns.
  • Check periodically to make sure you have them all.
  • If one comes up missing, if it has been less than 60-90 days since you last checked, you have until the 60-90 day mark to check with all your friends/family members to see if one of them has it.
  • Still can’t figure out where it is? Report it stolen.
  • You’re in the clear.

Only if 1) you didnt report the theft, and and 2) the missing guns are subsequently used to commit a crime. I’m pretty sure that upon finding your home had been robbed, you’d talk to your sons and try to figure out where each gun is, then assume any you cant account for were stolen and report it accordingly.

Remember, it isnt about preventing gun theft. It’s about accounting for the source of each criminal’s illegally obtained gun, and not allowing potential co-conspiritors to suddenly claim the criminal must’ve stolen it when they werent looking.

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I’m not very good with emoticons, so I’ll preface this with the disclaimer that none of the following is personal. I respect a great many of your opinions and critical thinking skills … (at least I didn’t say “no offense, but”)

So, if politicians can’t ban gun ownership, they can just chip away with requirement after onerous requirement until it’s nearly impossible to own a gun without being a criminal. That’s what they do now with everything.

I cut my original response to the “check your guns every x days”, and ended up leaving what looks like a smarta$$ response. That was not my intent, and here is what I should have taken the time to include.

Everybody wants to pass a new law to solve a problem. I’ve got a great alternative to passing more legal gun ownership restrictions. Enforce the #%&*% laws that are currently on the books. If they were enforced and there was still a “moron” problem, odds are that I would be more receptive to discussing a way to reduce the number of morons.

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It is.

What if you had to pass a sobriety check each and every time you got behind the wheel? What if you had to pass a background check and 7 day waiting period before buying a car? What about passing a driver’s test every 60 or 90 days?

I’m guessing that despite all the safety improvements over the past decades, the number of people killed or injured in vehicular accidents is still pretty high. These are preventable deaths.

With that description, I can legally avoid the law and reporting requirements, but still think it’s a bad law, but with good intentions … the road to Hades pavement. :slight_smile:

Well, now you’ve messed up my thinking. I am back to active opposition of the proposed law. :slight_smile: