Where we disagree? Privacy and Constitutionality. Everything else is barking in the wind until those two hurdles are crossed.
If the registry requires a warrant to access it, how is the Fourth Amendment violated?
Also, given that FFL records of who bought from them are already a widely established practice, and that the gun industry is already subject to pervasive regulation, there is already good reason to hold that there is not much of a reasonable expectation of privacy with respect to gun ownership in the first place.
I agree that privacy matters, but if you want to make an argument on privacy you're going to have to do more than just say "but privacy!"
I agree that privacy matters, but if you want to make an argument on privacy you're going to have to do more than just say "but privacy!"
At a certain point you do have to give up some privacy if you are keeping weapons in your house. For most stuff yeah the government shouldn't be snooping around, reading email taping phones that stuff, but for something like cars, guns, other potential dangerouse stuff should be recorded and with that comes a lessening of privacy.
1) issuing a warrant to access a home to search for weapons is very different than issuing a warrant to access a database of weapons. We have already seen that a home search requires a higher level of... Evidence? Probable Cause? The person being targeted also knows when their home has been searched, data search? Ah, no... Govt likes to keep that stuff secret cause 'might interfere with an investigation'.
As LOC has already stated when information is given to a third party its level of privacy drops precipitously. So why would a gun buyer want the information given to a third party? Keeping the information between buyer and seller keeps its privacy level high.
2) For the database to be useful all guns would have to be in it. Not just new but all. Again, you are asking people to give up a privacy right they already have and not offering enough in return.
3) How do you enforce background checks? I already answered that indirectly. Last person in the verifiable paper chain faces gun trafficking charges.
4) I have already agreed in principle with your elaboration when I stated that it is in the best interests of private sellers to keep records of their transfers so that they do not face a charge of gun trafficking when a gun they sold ends up used in a crime.
5) Nothing proposed would stop someone who is not part of the prohibited class from buying a gun and then making a choice to use it in a crime. Nor does anything stop someone from passing a gun to a member of the prohibited class and then claiming it to have been stolen.
Now (Churba) I have answered your elaborations as best I can. So if the discussion moves away from a national registry I might join back in, otherwise I have this big box of Ogre that just came in so... I'll be busy for a while!
Having a written registry of bullets and guns that you've bought, the details of the seller, what day you use them on, for what purpose, with the licensed gun users printed name and signature next to each use.
You must also provide your gun license to be scanned every time you buy bullets from a registered ammo seller.
This record keeping is open to being audited annually and at the same time your premises checked for proper gun and bullet storage with appropriate safe specifications. Also the receipts for your gun license payments are checked against what you have at your home. It is up to the person with the privilege of having a gun license to make themselves available.
If any rule is broken the Government has the right to remove your gun license and take all your guns. You can have your guns back after sitting a gun safety course and examination.
Having a written registry of bullets and guns that you've bought, the details of the seller, what day you use them on, for what purpose, with the licensed gun users printed name and signature next to each use.
What I've bought, assuming we eliminated the issues brought up earlier (illegal searches of the registry by government agencies and such), what I bought sure.
Why I bought it? When I want to use it? For what purpose?
No way.
I don't need to justify my purchase or how I want to use it to anyone, especially not the government. Why did I buy it, to shoot it, or put it in a safe, or use use it as Christmas tree decorations. If I'm not breaking the law, it's no one's business what I do with it but mine.
You must also provide your gun license to be scanned every time you buy bullets from a registered ammo seller.
Why? What is the purpose of your check? How does knowing how much ammo I have and who I buy from in any way stop gun crime (the purported purpose of these checks)?
This record keeping is open to being audited annually and at the same time your premises checked for proper gun and bullet storage with appropriate safe specifications. Also the receipts for your gun license payments are checked against what you have at your home. It is up to the person with the privilege of having a gun license to make themselves available.
If any rule is broken the Government has the right to remove your gun license and take all your guns. You can have your guns back after sitting a gun safety course and examination.
Deal breaker. No way.
You've just expanded a registry that others suggested was for tracking down guns used in crimes and punishing the owners if they didn't report it stolen or were making straw purchases into making me give up my 4th amendment rights in order to exercise my 2nd.
Why not just give me a poll tax or a test to see if I can vote.
Who gets to decide what kind of storage is legal? The same people who made "Saturday Night specials" a type of gun, a restriction aimed solely at poor black inner city gun owners in an effort to prevent them from having legal firearms to defend themselves.
Gun ownership is not a privilege, it is a right. Reasonable restrictions I can accept, giving up my constitutional protection against search in order to exercise my constitutional right to keep and bear arms, not going to be acceptable.
Why I bought it? When I want to use it? For what purpose?
No way.
Yeah, as much as I'm for universal registration, that's way over the top. The purpose of the registry is twofold - To know how many guns are in circulation and where, and to assist in the solving of crimes that may involve legally purchased firearms. That's just way, WAY too far - who the hell wants to fill out a legion of government forms every time they want to pop a few off at the range?
You must also provide your gun license to be scanned every time you buy bullets from a registered ammo seller.
Why? What is the purpose of your check? How does knowing how much ammo I have and who I buy from in any way stop gun crime (the purported purpose of these checks)? Again, way over the top. Maybe at most that the seller would have to sight your license during the sale, but anything more than that is silly.
This record keeping is open to being audited annually and at the same time your premises checked for proper gun and bullet storage with appropriate safe specifications. Also the receipts for your gun license payments are checked against what you have at your home. It is up to the person with the privilege of having a gun license to make themselves available.
That's WAY too much. I'll agree in one specific sense - In that a lot of gun safes are cheap garbage that can be opened using the drop method or otherwise trivially cut open, which makes them easy to steal from - but that's an issue of poor quality safes, and how a standard should be implemented regarding them, so that there's something to check to say "Hey, this is a quality safe and not cheap garbage" that people can check that to know they're buying a good safe, without having to know a shitload about safes.
I get mad whenever they use the amount of ammo someone buys as a gun control issue. After a shooting they'll say "[shooter] had over a thousand rounds with him!" Ok, but how much did he actually use? I doubt its more than a few magazine's worth. Plus some people just buy that amount of ammo for a weekend shooting with friends. And if we're talking about the majority of gun crimes that's not a factor at all. IIRC most shootings in general are 3 shots or less.
I get mad whenever they use the amount of ammo someone buys as a gun control issue. After a shooting they'll say "[shooter] had over a thousand rounds with him!" Ok, but how much did he actually use? I doubt its more than a few magazine's worth. Plus some people just buy that amount of ammo for a weekend shooting with friends. And if we're talking about the majority of gun crimes that's not a factor at all. IIRC most shootings in general are 3 shots or less.
I feel like that's all part of the horrible reverse-romanticizing news networks do when reporting on mass murder. It's all gotta be as awful and dramatic as possible. I guess they're trying to keep our attention.
I made my post intentionally extreme to see what pro gun users had to say because from my perspective, most pro gun posts seem extrreme (not living in a nation who has no trust in their Government, an overtly corrupt, broken political system, paranoid about Government services and a place where hourly shootings are the norm).
I simply put in the day to day workings of how secure drugs are used in my job.
I simply put in the day to day workings of how secure drugs are used in my job.
But people don't equate your drugs (which are designed to kill) with handguns (which are designed to kill). The fact that your drugs are designed to be used on animals and handguns are designed to be used on humans is besides the point.*
*specifically talking about loaded handguns carried or kept in the home for self defense.
Yes, because nobody ever robbed a vet's surgery for Ketamine, have they? I mean, it's not like Green Dream/pentobarbitone is the ONLY drug vets ever have, because killing animals is all vets ever do. It's not like they have large stocks of narcotics that work perfectly well on humans, like Buprenorphine, Hydromorphone and Morphine, Telazol. It's not like you can buy lethal drugs at the pharmacy, over the counter.
Luke, I say fair enough to your absolutism on killing, but it's getting to the point where I think you're going past absolutism and into zealotry, and stretching to turn every situation into a case applicable to your black-and-white philosophy on the issue.
Yes, because nobody ever robbed a vet's surgery for Ketamine, have they?
People don't end up stealing S8 drugs from small animal clinics, let alone S4 drugs because of the required security measures. However if a Vet leaves out an S8 drug and it gets stolen I think they should lose their registration on the spot.
The clinic I worked at in Melbourne has a larger sister clinic who had been broken into regularly but no drugs get taken and if they do, it is a handful of antibiotics or some drug that couldn't be overdosed on or give you a high. They mainly go in to get cash (even though you would only leave like $200 in the till and put the rest in the safe) or something else.
When flat panel monitors were first released I think that clinic bought like 8 or 10 at a few thousand dollars each. Someone dug a hole, from next door, under the clinic and up through the floor to steal all the monitors, they didn't even try going for the drugs.
The main problem is the occasional Vet who becomes a drug supplier on the side to augment his/her income. The people that steal drugs unfortunately end up being new, young Vet nurses.
I mean, it's not like Green Dream/pentobarbitone is the ONLY drug vets ever have, because killing animals is all vets ever do. It's not like they have large stocks of narcotics that work perfectly well on humans, like Buprenorphine, Hydromorphone and Morphine, Telazol. It's not like you can buy lethal drugs at the pharmacy, over the counter.
Most S8 drugs are lethal if you use them without knowing how concentrated they are. Drugs come in both large animal and small animal concentrations. Some small animal clinics will stock both varieties or a mix. Where 0.01 or 0.1ml of the large animal drug would equate to 1 to 10 mls of the small animal equivalent as far as the total quantity of drug is considered. Plus on top of this humans are seemingly more responsive to the psychotropic affect of these drugs.
Wow I didn't know people stole zolazepam and tiletamine. That's just fucked up, each drug on it's own would either give you relaxation or a dissociative high but together (I extrapolate from patients that recover poorly) it would give some pretty weird hyperactivity without being able to move very well for a quite a few hours.
I've always wondered how drug abusers know how much morphine to take, I just have a mental picture of them taking it then vomiting, having diarrhoea and then having difficulty breathing and aspirating the vomit.
Anyhow, next time you rob a Vet the best thing is to just grab the codeine tablets if you are able to saw through the safe.
Luke, I say fair enough to your absolutism on killing, but it's getting to the point where I think you're going past absolutism and into zealotry, and stretching to turn every situation into a case applicable to your black-and-white philosophy on the issue.
The position of absolutism is for the sake of pragmatic solutions and debate. The vast majority of gun deaths have nothing to do situations where someone is in a life-or-death, either I'm dead or they have to be, situation. The vast, vast majority are cases where someone is carrying or has easy access to a loaded gun for not-sport or not-hunting purposes, and someone (themselves or someone else) ends up dying.
Every other case of gun death is an edge case. These cases, due to their infrequent nature, make the news big time. I pretty much don't give a shit about these cases, because they fall into the "no law will stop psychopathic people killing others" category.
Gun registries and tracking ammo is what people propose to stop these, but I just don't see that working. I'm on the side of gun enthusiasts in these cases. In fact, I'm on the side of anyone who wants to use any guns for any purposes whatsoever, and think it's none of the government's business to intrude on that.
Yes, because nobody ever robbed a vet's surgery for Ketamine, have they?
People don't end up stealing S8 drugs from small animal clinics, let alone S4 drugs because of the required security measures. However if a Vet leaves out an S8 drug and it gets stolen I think they should lose their registration on the spot.
I covered two cases in the UK, so it does happen. If it does happen here, I couldn't tell you. And you probably could, considering. I don't mean left out, though, I mean various hoodlums with ill intent breaking in once everyone's fucked off, rather than just swiping something left out.
Also, they got buried ten pages deep in local papers, fucking useless. Might as well left it to the police blotter.
Most S8 drugs are lethal if you use them without knowing how concentrated they are.
Absolutely, but you know as well as I do that the dose makes the poison. That said, the kind of people that are knocking over a fucking vets for gear aren't really giving a shit about the concentration, they're just robbing it for a hit, some cash, or both.
Wow I didn't know people stole zolazepam and tiletamine. That's just fucked up, each drug on it's own would either give you relaxation or a dissociative high but together (I extrapolate from patients that recover poorly) it would give some pretty weird hyperactivity without being able to move very well for a quite a few hours.
Fucking oath they will. In one of the smash-and-grabs I mentioned a moment ago, they stole...Enroflacin? Enrofloxacin? Some shit like that, but it was an antibiotic, wasn't even a fucking narcotic, they didn't give a shit, they swiped it away. And bet you any money they're going to easily find some poor junkie fucker who will jam it in their veins or swallow it as a pill.
I've always wondered how drug abusers know how much morphine to take, I just have a mental picture of them taking it then vomiting, having diarrhoea and then having difficulty breathing and aspirating the vomit.
If you really want to know, I'm pretty sure I can find out via a mate. Wild ass guess - they start at low dose, and just go with that till it stops being quite so great anymore, then they just start whacking a bit more in the needle.
Not right now I don't but I'll get back to you I guess. But fair enough aye to the rest. If it's just for the sake of discussion, all good.
For the sake of discussion, and to propose some sensible law changes. The fewer guns used for self defense the better, especially since people would rather kill someone than bother retreating, or losing a car, as killing someone is perceived to be more convenient.
It's a good thing the judge approved a no-knock warrant when the suspect is rumored to have illegal guns. Sure wouldn't want to make someone shoot an intruder police officer when they break the door down. Link.
I covered two cases in the UK, so it does happen. If it does happen here, I couldn't tell you. And you probably could, considering. I don't mean left out, though, I mean various hoodlums with ill intent breaking in once everyone's fucked off, rather than just swiping something left out.
Also, they got buried ten pages deep in local papers, fucking useless. Might as well left it to the police blotter.
I didn't realise you were speaking of the UK. The security levels I saw there varied from clinic to clinic wildly (similar to quality of medicine and surgery).
When any drugs get out of hands in Australia you get a moderate media storm and a heavy ripple nationally of audit frequency increasing but it is kept within the profession so the public don't see this.
Wow I didn't know people stole zolazepam and tiletamine. That's just fucked up, each drug on it's own would either give you relaxation or a dissociative high but together (I extrapolate from patients that recover poorly) it would give some pretty weird hyperactivity without being able to move very well for a quite a few hours.
Fucking oath they will. In one of the smash-and-grabs I mentioned a moment ago, they stole...Enroflacin? Enrofloxacin? Some shit like that, but it was an antibiotic, wasn't even a fucking narcotic, they didn't give a shit, they swiped it away. And bet you any money they're going to easily find some poor junkie fucker who will jam it in their veins or swallow it as a pill.
Their nature is universally the same I guess. Enrofloxacin only becomes toxic at extremely high concentrations and is only actually dangerous to young immature animals with developing bone structure.
I don't think you needed a disclaimer for your post, you didn't even slur your words.
I don't think you needed a disclaimer for your post, you didn't even slur your words.
I'm not so sure - spell-check and a bit of careful proof-reading works wonders, but as far as I know, nobody's invented a spell-check for saying dumb shit. On the other hand, regarding me saying dumb shit when I'm pissed - in vino veritas.
Fuckin' dusty in the morning though, tell you what.
For the sake of discussion, and to propose some sensible law changes. The fewer guns used for self defense the better, especially since people would rather kill someone than bother retreating, or losing a car, as killing someone is perceived to be more convenient.
I'll admit, there's a mindset I don't understand - Shooting people over property like that. I mean, if someone is in my home, I was armed, and they try to attack me, I make no bones about it, I will probably shoot them once I'm sure they're an intruder and not someone who is meant to be there. But if they were doing a runner with my toaster or something because they heard me coming down the stairs, then whatever, it's just stuff, I'm not going to go shooting at someone over that. No point shooting anyone about it, at least from my point of view.
Anyone who shoots someone in the back over property deserves to go to prison. Even when I worked for Brinks as an armored car guard, we didn't shoot someone in the back over money. (ie, they grab a bundle of cash and leg it).
The distinction lies on if you shouldn't make a confrontation with someone over property. I say yes, you can confront them and if they become violent you can defend yourself with a gun.
I interpret Luke as saying you can confront someone over property (the ipad example) and use violence, but not a gun. That doesn't make sense to me personally, a knife can kill almost as easily as a gun at close range and people can die from being punched just once.
No matter how much we disagree on the above points I think everyone on the board (and the law in every state that I'm aware of (even Texas)) does not agree with killing someone over property alone.
I interpret Luke as saying you can confront someone over property (the ipad example) and use violence, but not a gun. That doesn't make sense to me personally, a knife can kill almost as easily as a gun at close range and people can die from being punched just once.
People can die from being punched just once, people will die from being shot. There's an difference there.
To be clear, I didn't confront someone over an iPad. A guy violently grabbed my girlfriend from behind, elbowed her in the ear and tried to pull her iPad away, which wasn't going to work due to the angle he was pulling and how she was holding it. I punched him in the face, not to save an iPad, as I couldn't give a shit about that, but to get him away from my girlfriend as quickly as possible.
The plan worked, and he backed down. If it hadn't worked, and he had drawn a knife or gun, we would have handed over the iPad. I would also never use a knife for self defense, as I can't think of a more annoying or messy weapon.
To be clear, I didn't confront someone over an iPad. A guy violently grabbed my girlfriend from behind, elbowed her in the ear and tried to pull her iPad away, which wasn't going to work due to the angle he was pulling and how she was holding it. I punched him in the face, not to save an iPad, as I couldn't give a shit about that, but to get him away from my girlfriend as quickly as possible.
The plan worked, and he backed down. If it hadn't worked, and he had drawn a knife or gun, we would have handed over the iPad. I would also never use a knife for self defense, as I can't think of a more annoying or messy weapon.
I didn't take the time to respond "last year", but I wanted to clear a couple of things up from my earlier discussion with Steve.
Ultimately, the drive behind registration is to hold firearm owners accountable for what happens to their firearms. Steve's comments imply that firearm owners are already accountable under current laws, but this is plainly false. In fact, not only are legal provisions enforcing such accountability severely lacking, but there are many provisions that actively work against such accountability.
Absence of records past the initial sale by an FFL is a critical issue; the ability of the federal government to enforce gun legislation, and to track how guns end up being used in crimes, is severely crippled unless someone, somewhere, is actually held responsible for keeping such records.
Similarly, people need to be legally responsible for reporting their firearms lost or stolen, which also means that as a direct consequence people need to document the serial numbers for the guns they own; after all, if your gun is lost or stolen you won't be able to read the serial number off the gun itself, will you?
In particular, in order to enforce universal background checks you need to be able to establish that someone transferred ownership of their gun, and that a background check did not take place. Under the current system, to do this you would need to establish that the gun was sold directly rather than via a third party, and that a proper background check could not have taken place.
Without record-keeping provisions the former is essentially impossible to do on a large scale, and even the latter is more difficult than it needs to be - currently, records for background checks that are approved are destroyed within 24 hours. Better record-keeping provisions would do a lot for the effectiveness of such a system.
The main reason for a gun registry is simply that it is the most pragmatic approach to resolve the issue of accountability - a central database vastly simplifies the act of tracing a firearm, which is currently far too complex and resource-consuming; it also minimizes the time and effort FFLs and private sellers need to spend on keeping their own records. Moreover, use of a central database limits the ability of the FFLs and private sellers to be fraudulent in their records or to find excuses for failing to keeping records properly.
Although privacy concerns do exist for such a system, appropriate legal constraints can resolve most of the issue.
That being said, a registry is not a necessity to achieve what I'm asking after here; the main issue is that proper record-keeping provisions are an essential part of a reasonable approach to gun control. Considering the widespread opposition to and paranoia about gun registration, I think the following offers a reasonable compromise - require mandatory record keeping, but have the federal government give you the option of keeping your records for you. I still think that a registry is clearly a much better bet, for reasons I've already stated above, but ultimately it's about establishing accountability for firearm ownership.
2) For the database to be useful all guns would have to be in it. Not just new but all.
While I do think it would be better to require universal registration, it isn't a necessity in order to be useful. Your suggestion implies that any data is useless unless it is 100% complete, which is quite clearly untrue.
3) How do you enforce background checks? I already answered that indirectly. Last person in the verifiable paper chain faces gun trafficking charges.
4) I have already agreed in principle with your elaboration when I stated that it is in the best interests of private sellers to keep records of their transfers so that they do not face a charge of gun trafficking when a gun they sold ends up used in a crime.
Without additional legislation the kinds of charges you're talking about are essentially meaningless, and often disproportionate to what's going on. It is necessary to introduce new laws that actually require people to keep proper documentation, and hold them responsible for their transactions.
Meanwhile, not only do current laws not require proper documentation, they quite plainly go in the opposite direction - as mentioned previously, there are laws that specifically block the ATF from requiring gun dealers to keep records of their inventories.
5) Nothing proposed would stop someone who is not part of the prohibited class from buying a gun and then making a choice to use it in a crime.
Nor does anything stop someone from passing a gun to a member of the prohibited class and then claiming it to have been stolen.
That's not how laws work, Steve. They don't need to be perfect and flawless in order to be effective or useful. If we took your points to their logical conclusion, the argument would be that we shouldn't have any laws because criminals aren't going to follow them anyway.
With regards to the first point, you're right, but it doesn't really matter too much. A significant majority of murders are committed by people with previous criminal records, so there is plenty of benefit to be had in making it harder for those people to get guns.
As for the second point, these ideas may not stop such actions altogether, but that's not necessary in order to make a big difference. Above all, a universal background check prevents people from unwittingly selling to the prohibited class; instead, they would necessarily be knowingly breaking the law. The difference between the two is very large indeed.
For a start, simply knowing that it is illegal to sell / transfer without a background check is a significant deterrent to such actions. Most people selling weapons would follow such laws, and hence it would be significantly harder to buy weapons without a background check; this would also be compounded by the effect of legal penalties for circumventing the background checks.
Yes, you might be able to sell one weapon and get away with it by falsely reporting it stolen, but there are significant downsides to attempting this. For a start, the reports themselves give information to the authorities, which makes it much easier to catch these offenses. In particular, larger-scale offenders would be at significant risk of being caught due to patterns in the reports and in the paper trails associated with the guns. Furthermore, this type of crime would also come with severe gun-trafficking penalties.
Comments
Also, given that FFL records of who bought from them are already a widely established practice, and that the gun industry is already subject to pervasive regulation, there is already good reason to hold that there is not much of a reasonable expectation of privacy with respect to gun ownership in the first place.
I agree that privacy matters, but if you want to make an argument on privacy you're going to have to do more than just say "but privacy!"
As LOC has already stated when information is given to a third party its level of privacy drops precipitously. So why would a gun buyer want the information given to a third party? Keeping the information between buyer and seller keeps its privacy level high.
2) For the database to be useful all guns would have to be in it. Not just new but all. Again, you are asking people to give up a privacy right they already have and not offering enough in return.
3) How do you enforce background checks? I already answered that indirectly. Last person in the verifiable paper chain faces gun trafficking charges.
4) I have already agreed in principle with your elaboration when I stated that it is in the best interests of private sellers to keep records of their transfers so that they do not face a charge of gun trafficking when a gun they sold ends up used in a crime.
5) Nothing proposed would stop someone who is not part of the prohibited class from buying a gun and then making a choice to use it in a crime. Nor does anything stop someone from passing a gun to a member of the prohibited class and then claiming it to have been stolen.
Now (Churba) I have answered your elaborations as best I can. So if the discussion moves away from a national registry I might join back in, otherwise I have this big box of Ogre that just came in so... I'll be busy for a while!
You must also provide your gun license to be scanned every time you buy bullets from a registered ammo seller.
This record keeping is open to being audited annually and at the same time your premises checked for proper gun and bullet storage with appropriate safe specifications. Also the receipts for your gun license payments are checked against what you have at your home. It is up to the person with the privilege of having a gun license to make themselves available.
If any rule is broken the Government has the right to remove your gun license and take all your guns. You can have your guns back after sitting a gun safety course and examination.
Why I bought it? When I want to use it? For what purpose?
No way.
I don't need to justify my purchase or how I want to use it to anyone, especially not the government. Why did I buy it, to shoot it, or put it in a safe, or use use it as Christmas tree decorations. If I'm not breaking the law, it's no one's business what I do with it but mine.
Why? What is the purpose of your check? How does knowing how much ammo I have and who I buy from in any way stop gun crime (the purported purpose of these checks)?
Deal breaker. No way.
You've just expanded a registry that others suggested was for tracking down guns used in crimes and punishing the owners if they didn't report it stolen or were making straw purchases into making me give up my 4th amendment rights in order to exercise my 2nd.
Why not just give me a poll tax or a test to see if I can vote.
Who gets to decide what kind of storage is legal? The same people who made "Saturday Night specials" a type of gun, a restriction aimed solely at poor black inner city gun owners in an effort to prevent them from having legal firearms to defend themselves.
Gun ownership is not a privilege, it is a right. Reasonable restrictions I can accept, giving up my constitutional protection against search in order to exercise my constitutional right to keep and bear arms, not going to be acceptable.
Again, way over the top. Maybe at most that the seller would have to sight your license during the sale, but anything more than that is silly. That's WAY too much. I'll agree in one specific sense - In that a lot of gun safes are cheap garbage that can be opened using the drop method or otherwise trivially cut open, which makes them easy to steal from - but that's an issue of poor quality safes, and how a standard should be implemented regarding them, so that there's something to check to say "Hey, this is a quality safe and not cheap garbage" that people can check that to know they're buying a good safe, without having to know a shitload about safes.
I simply put in the day to day workings of how secure drugs are used in my job.
*specifically talking about loaded handguns carried or kept in the home for self defense.
Luke, I say fair enough to your absolutism on killing, but it's getting to the point where I think you're going past absolutism and into zealotry, and stretching to turn every situation into a case applicable to your black-and-white philosophy on the issue.
The clinic I worked at in Melbourne has a larger sister clinic who had been broken into regularly but no drugs get taken and if they do, it is a handful of antibiotics or some drug that couldn't be overdosed on or give you a high. They mainly go in to get cash (even though you would only leave like $200 in the till and put the rest in the safe) or something else.
When flat panel monitors were first released I think that clinic bought like 8 or 10 at a few thousand dollars each. Someone dug a hole, from next door, under the clinic and up through the floor to steal all the monitors, they didn't even try going for the drugs.
The main problem is the occasional Vet who becomes a drug supplier on the side to augment his/her income. The people that steal drugs unfortunately end up being new, young Vet nurses. Most S8 drugs are lethal if you use them without knowing how concentrated they are. Drugs come in both large animal and small animal concentrations. Some small animal clinics will stock both varieties or a mix. Where 0.01 or 0.1ml of the large animal drug would equate to 1 to 10 mls of the small animal equivalent as far as the total quantity of drug is considered. Plus on top of this humans are seemingly more responsive to the psychotropic affect of these drugs.
Wow I didn't know people stole zolazepam and tiletamine. That's just fucked up, each drug on it's own would either give you relaxation or a dissociative high but together (I extrapolate from patients that recover poorly) it would give some pretty weird hyperactivity without being able to move very well for a quite a few hours.
I've always wondered how drug abusers know how much morphine to take, I just have a mental picture of them taking it then vomiting, having diarrhoea and then having difficulty breathing and aspirating the vomit.
Anyhow, next time you rob a Vet the best thing is to just grab the codeine tablets if you are able to saw through the safe.
Every other case of gun death is an edge case. These cases, due to their infrequent nature, make the news big time. I pretty much don't give a shit about these cases, because they fall into the "no law will stop psychopathic people killing others" category.
Gun registries and tracking ammo is what people propose to stop these, but I just don't see that working. I'm on the side of gun enthusiasts in these cases. In fact, I'm on the side of anyone who wants to use any guns for any purposes whatsoever, and think it's none of the government's business to intrude on that.
Except... well, you know what except for.
Also, they got buried ten pages deep in local papers, fucking useless. Might as well left it to the police blotter. Absolutely, but you know as well as I do that the dose makes the poison. That said, the kind of people that are knocking over a fucking vets for gear aren't really giving a shit about the concentration, they're just robbing it for a hit, some cash, or both. Fucking oath they will. In one of the smash-and-grabs I mentioned a moment ago, they stole...Enroflacin? Enrofloxacin? Some shit like that, but it was an antibiotic, wasn't even a fucking narcotic, they didn't give a shit, they swiped it away. And bet you any money they're going to easily find some poor junkie fucker who will jam it in their veins or swallow it as a pill. If you really want to know, I'm pretty sure I can find out via a mate. Wild ass guess - they start at low dose, and just go with that till it stops being quite so great anymore, then they just start whacking a bit more in the needle. Thanks for the advice? Not right now I don't but I'll get back to you I guess. But fair enough aye to the rest. If it's just for the sake of discussion, all good.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/12/23/colorado-girl-mistaken-burglar-killed/4180329/
When any drugs get out of hands in Australia you get a moderate media storm and a heavy ripple nationally of audit frequency increasing but it is kept within the profession so the public don't see this.
Their nature is universally the same I guess. Enrofloxacin only becomes toxic at extremely high concentrations and is only actually dangerous to young immature animals with developing bone structure.
I don't think you needed a disclaimer for your post, you didn't even slur your words.
Fuckin' dusty in the morning though, tell you what. I'll admit, there's a mindset I don't understand - Shooting people over property like that. I mean, if someone is in my home, I was armed, and they try to attack me, I make no bones about it, I will probably shoot them once I'm sure they're an intruder and not someone who is meant to be there. But if they were doing a runner with my toaster or something because they heard me coming down the stairs, then whatever, it's just stuff, I'm not going to go shooting at someone over that. No point shooting anyone about it, at least from my point of view.
The distinction lies on if you shouldn't make a confrontation with someone over property. I say yes, you can confront them and if they become violent you can defend yourself with a gun.
I interpret Luke as saying you can confront someone over property (the ipad example) and use violence, but not a gun. That doesn't make sense to me personally, a knife can kill almost as easily as a gun at close range and people can die from being punched just once.
No matter how much we disagree on the above points I think everyone on the board (and the law in every state that I'm aware of (even Texas)) does not agree with killing someone over property alone.
The plan worked, and he backed down. If it hadn't worked, and he had drawn a knife or gun, we would have handed over the iPad. I would also never use a knife for self defense, as I can't think of a more annoying or messy weapon.
Ultimately, the drive behind registration is to hold firearm owners accountable for what happens to their firearms. Steve's comments imply that firearm owners are already accountable under current laws, but this is plainly false. In fact, not only are legal provisions enforcing such accountability severely lacking, but there are many provisions that actively work against such accountability.
Absence of records past the initial sale by an FFL is a critical issue; the ability of the federal government to enforce gun legislation, and to track how guns end up being used in crimes, is severely crippled unless someone, somewhere, is actually held responsible for keeping such records.
Similarly, people need to be legally responsible for reporting their firearms lost or stolen, which also means that as a direct consequence people need to document the serial numbers for the guns they own; after all, if your gun is lost or stolen you won't be able to read the serial number off the gun itself, will you?
In particular, in order to enforce universal background checks you need to be able to establish that someone transferred ownership of their gun, and that a background check did not take place. Under the current system, to do this you would need to establish that the gun was sold directly rather than via a third party, and that a proper background check could not have taken place.
Without record-keeping provisions the former is essentially impossible to do on a large scale, and even the latter is more difficult than it needs to be - currently, records for background checks that are approved are destroyed within 24 hours. Better record-keeping provisions would do a lot for the effectiveness of such a system.
The main reason for a gun registry is simply that it is the most pragmatic approach to resolve the issue of accountability - a central database vastly simplifies the act of tracing a firearm, which is currently far too complex and resource-consuming; it also minimizes the time and effort FFLs and private sellers need to spend on keeping their own records. Moreover, use of a central database limits the ability of the FFLs and private sellers to be fraudulent in their records or to find excuses for failing to keeping records properly.
Although privacy concerns do exist for such a system, appropriate legal constraints can resolve most of the issue.
That being said, a registry is not a necessity to achieve what I'm asking after here; the main issue is that proper record-keeping provisions are an essential part of a reasonable approach to gun control. Considering the widespread opposition to and paranoia about gun registration, I think the following offers a reasonable compromise - require mandatory record keeping, but have the federal government give you the option of keeping your records for you. I still think that a registry is clearly a much better bet, for reasons I've already stated above, but ultimately it's about establishing accountability for firearm ownership. While I do think it would be better to require universal registration, it isn't a necessity in order to be useful. Your suggestion implies that any data is useless unless it is 100% complete, which is quite clearly untrue. Without additional legislation the kinds of charges you're talking about are essentially meaningless, and often disproportionate to what's going on. It is necessary to introduce new laws that actually require people to keep proper documentation, and hold them responsible for their transactions.
Meanwhile, not only do current laws not require proper documentation, they quite plainly go in the opposite direction - as mentioned previously, there are laws that specifically block the ATF from requiring gun dealers to keep records of their inventories. That's not how laws work, Steve. They don't need to be perfect and flawless in order to be effective or useful. If we took your points to their logical conclusion, the argument would be that we shouldn't have any laws because criminals aren't going to follow them anyway.
With regards to the first point, you're right, but it doesn't really matter too much. A significant majority of murders are committed by people with previous criminal records, so there is plenty of benefit to be had in making it harder for those people to get guns.
As for the second point, these ideas may not stop such actions altogether, but that's not necessary in order to make a big difference. Above all, a universal background check prevents people from unwittingly selling to the prohibited class; instead, they would necessarily be knowingly breaking the law. The difference between the two is very large indeed.
For a start, simply knowing that it is illegal to sell / transfer without a background check is a significant deterrent to such actions. Most people selling weapons would follow such laws, and hence it would be significantly harder to buy weapons without a background check; this would also be compounded by the effect of legal penalties for circumventing the background checks.
Yes, you might be able to sell one weapon and get away with it by falsely reporting it stolen, but there are significant downsides to attempting this. For a start, the reports themselves give information to the authorities, which makes it much easier to catch these offenses. In particular, larger-scale offenders would be at significant risk of being caught due to patterns in the reports and in the paper trails associated with the guns. Furthermore, this type of crime would also come with severe gun-trafficking penalties.
Gun defenders threaten company employees with death.
http://www.fark.com/comments/8245277/Dumb-guns-rights-advocates-issue-death-threats-force-gun-shop-to-back-off-on-plans-to-sell-smart-guns