Here’s the flaw in your perception of this - this would be no different than giving a driver a breathalyzer after he’s caused an accident. Drunk driving laws basically let you get away with the negligence of driving while intoxicated, unless your doing so causes problems. This would be no different for gun owners.
You can be held responsible for fraudulent charges on your credit card if you don’t report the theft/fraud within a specified number of days. This is applying the exact same standard. After your gun shoots someone, you have 60 days to give a reason why you weren’t involved. And like a credit card charge that goes undisputed, after 60 days it allows for the presumption that the transaction (or the use of the gun) was either directly or indirectly authorized.
Or are you also complaining that banks are creating an impossible burden by requiring you review you account records every 60 days, or else be stuck with the liability for unauthorized activity?
That’s the whole purpose of this! This doesn’t criminalize anything, it establishes a basis for enforcing an existing law. You’d still need to be convicted under the existing law - and if you’ve been in a coma in Bangladesh for two years, during which time the gun locked in your safe at home was stolen and used on a crime spree, I doubt anyone would even try to prosecute you for being a “strawman”, let alone convict you.
The entire point is to limit your ability to claim Pookie must’ve stolen your gun after you find out Pookie took the gun you gave him and shot up a McDonald’s.
Just a reminder. The issue is violent gun crime and the fact is that the vast majority of law abiding gun owners don’t commit violent gun crime, have no desire to commit violent gun crime, and will never commit violent gun crime. The left’s moderate solution to violent gun crime is to make it harder for everyone (which means mostly law abiding gun owners that have no effect on violent gun crime) to buy guns. The left’s less moderate, but still mainstream solution is to make almost all of those law abiding gun owners that don’t commit violent gun crime into felons by making the guns they purchased legally, illegal to own. Our solution to violent gun crime is to prosecute people that are breaking current laws getting guns into the hands of people that do commit violent gun crime. The only thing our solution would require of law abiding gun owners is a very basic requirement of making sure their guns are where they last left them every few months. It doesn’t even require them to buy a safe or lock. Even though failure to report a gun stolen can be prima facie evidence of straw purchasing the gun for the criminal that used it, I am not suggesting that police and prosecutors go after people that are too lazy, infirmed, or forgetful to inventory their guns. They should still do an investigation to see if that person is likely a straw purchaser - i.e. If you bought a gun in 2019, your gun is stolen into in 2022, and you fail to report it stolen because it was taken by your meth head son that you had over for Thanksgiving and you were in denial that you should check your gun collection every time he comes over the house, that’s clearly not a straw purchase. People don’t straw purchase guns for criminals 3 years beforehand.
Alos, the penalty for failure to report the stolen gun in a case like that (first time offense) should be a misdemeanor with suspended jail time/probation, a fine, and a gun safety class. The person in that case should be prohibited from buying (but not possessing) a gun for the length of the suspended jail time and until he completes the gun safety course and pays the fine. If the person follows all those things, after 2-3 years, the conviction can even drop off their record. Obviously, if they don’t, it should stay. And there should be stiffer penalties for 2nd and 3rd convictions. Should it rise to a felony at some point. That’s possible too, but I’d like to see some data first.
Also important - this should all be dependent on prosecuting more straw purchasers and/or possession of stolen firearm cases. If a police department/prosecutor’s office is only prosecuting people for failure to report a stolen gun, but not getting the actual straw purchasers with nexuses to the people committing the violent gun crime, or enhancing those criminal’s sentences with a possession of stolen gun conviction, that would be a problem and the law should be repealed. I would be in favor of a sunset provision to see if it were actually accomplishing its goal before extending it beyond 5 or so years.
It really isnt even a requirement. After a period of time, it merely flips the presumption of ingnorance into a presumption of complicity. Using the guilt of not reporting it stolen to presume that it was not really stolen and was in fact knowingly given away. Even if the stars align where an innocent gun owner inadvertantly gets wrapped up in such a case, where their gun falls into the hands of someone not allowed to have it, they still get to defend themselves against the presumption they provided it willingly. They just wont be able to argue blind ignorance as a defense; they’d need more tangible evidence than hypothetical what-ifs to explain their role (or lack of a role), a substantial explanation (beyond “I havent bothered to check”) as to why it’s reasonable that the alleged theft hadnt been reported.
That is the flaw in your perception of my argument. Maybe I should have found a better one, but my point was that you’re proposing a new law to limit my rights. My point about the breathalyzer and driving test was an example of limiting your rights, although you had done nothing wrong.
If I don’t know one of my guns has been stolen, how can I report it. Your answer seems to be with a new law that makes me take inventory every 90 days.
Since so many people drive recklessly and kill / injure people, maybe we should require everyone to take a state approved driver’s course every 90 days to remind them of the rules of the road. If you’re involved in a crash, you’ll need to prove that you took the course or head to the pokey.
The difference is, I am not guaranteed the right to a credit card.
It criminalizes not taking inventory every 90 days. If someone somehow broke into my safe without leaving a trace of the break-in, I might not know if they took one of my handguns, as most are in cases within the safe. And just so you don’t think I take gun security lightly, my gun safe cost way more than my first car.
No, but as a work-around for your proposed law, I could sell the gun privately and buy it back privately.
This seems very reasonable and I would be amenable to it if I were 25 years old. Sadly, my recollection of laws that are supposed to end are generally limited to tax cuts. All others seem to be renewed in perpetuity.
If I cut it off there, we’d be in complete agreement. Additionally, if current laws were enforced, and if gun crimes were not reduced after 5 years, I’d be open to your proposed law. I don’t believe we’ll see current laws enforced until the social pendulum swings back toward the center/right.
That’s the whole issue - its virtually impossible to effectively enforce the existing laws, when “What if maybe Pookie stole it from me when I wasnt paying attention” is a valid defense.
It criminalizes not taking inventory every 90 days. If someone somehow broke into my safe without leaving a trace of the break-in, I might not know if they took one of my handguns, as most are in cases within the safe. And just so you don’t think I take gun security lightly, my gun safe cost way more than my first car.
Do you spend any meaningful amount of energy worrying about super-thief leave-no-trace burglars?
Can you answer a serious question for me, that’s getting off topic but I’d still like to ask? And I know you understand that I am not against gun ownership, and do not subscribe to the typical leftist rabblerousing about how it’s not necessary, no one needs to own a bazooka, blah blah blah.
But really, if you keep these guns in cases, locked in a safe, that you dont pay any attention to for months if not years at a time, what’s the point? If you own them for potential future needs, then dont you inherently want to periodically make sure they’re still accessable to you if you do need them? And if it’s more as a collection, arent collections ment to be looked at and appreciated occasionally, or at least be maintained to prevent deterioration? And if it’s the “buried in the basement wall so no one knows I have them” type of collection, then no one knows they’re there to be stolen in the first place, and it’d be rather obvious if someone did unbury them.
That’s what I dont get. Sure, there can be flukes that may temporarily distract you from your gun collection for an extended period of time, but in general I’d think that most serious gun owners already paying some sort of attention to their guns once/quarter anyways?
I know you’re not asking me, but I am kinda in this category. I bought some guns thinking I would shoot them more often than I actually do. So I actually own several guns for no reason and they just sit in a safe. But I must be weird because I like to check on them from time to time to make sure they are still there even though no one else uses that safe and I doubt my wife even remembers the combination. But, more importantly:
This is why I wouldn’t worry if I forgot and went 180 days without taking an inventory. There is no super-thief leave-no-trace burglars going after my sub $2,000 gun “collection.” I would notice if someone broke into my house and I would check my gun safe immediately. The police would have a listing of my stolen guns that same day they were stolen.
I can’t address gun collections, but I have stuff around the house that I definitely want but never look at or use: backups for the stuff I do use. Some of it is simply stocking up on sales, some of it is maintaining one sale-price backup for what is currently in use. And there’s stuff whose use is situational. We have taken zero trips since Covid, our luggage sits untouched. Does that mean we don’t care about it?!
And the law needs to consider flukes. Growing up at one point we put our stuff in storage, in one sense we were homeless for the next 8 months. (Planned, there was always a roof over our heads but no fixed address.) Later, another trip was 12 months but we had a house-sitter rather than our stuff in storage.
And literally thousands of people a year set out to thru-hike the various great trails in America. I don’t believe anyone has completed such a hike within your 90 day window.
Those aren’t flukes. Those are planned events. If you know you aren’t going to be able to secure your firearms for a time period longer than the law, they need to go into police storage. Or, if you don’t trust the police, there is the likely possibility of an entrepreneur coming up with a cost effective solution for people like you in response to this law.
None of the options you present protects against inside-job theft. Plenty of drugs get stolen from evidence lockers.
While I find the basic concept of required reporting good it shouldn’t be automatically guilty if it’s not reported. Rather, make it a rebuttable presumption.
Those are all planned things. So you get someone to be responsible for you. I know you harp on the whole “inside job” thing - but it isnt about preventing them from being stolen, it’s to assign someone the responsibility to report them stolen in your absence. If that someone uses their access to steal them and doesnt report it, they’re still the one on the hook for not reporting the theft. So mission accomplished - in addition to being charged with the crime they used the gun for, and the theft of the gun, they also get to be charged with failure to report a gun being stolen.
A fluke is when you get t-boned on your commute home tonight and are laying in the hospital in a coma for 6 months.
If your gun was stolen and used in a drive by shooting while you were laying in a coma for 6 months, I find it hard to believe any judge or jury in the country would find you guilty of not reporting that theft.
I’m more concerned with the people who don’t come home for more than the reporting interval.
You have more trust of the system that I do–we have that case not too long ago about a woman getting 5 years in jail for voting illegally–after she was told by the voting people that it was legal for her to vote. It’s especially a problem when something horrific happens–I’m thinking of a local case some years back where she got a huge sentence for DUI manslaughter of a group of teens. No, she had traces of marijuana, she wasn’t high, it was simply a case of falling asleep at the wheel, not DUI at all.
I’m more worried about the implication that you think it’s ok to be away from home for an extended period of time, have reasonable concerns that the gun(s) stored in your home may be stolen while you are away, yet do nothing to mitigate those concerns prior to going away. And that’s ignoring the fact we dont even care if a theft does occur, just that someone remains accountable for reporting it.
When put that way, yeah, I guess you kind of do fit into one of the types of [careless] people this proposed law is intended to target.
I don’t believe perfect answers exist and thus I don’t demand perfect behavior of others (not that you are presenting any perfect solutions anyway.) I consider long term storage locked in a safe to be adequate precautions and probably the best that can be done.
