During the Christmas holiday I spent time with both my family and my wife’s family. Given many of the recent shootings more than a few conversations about gun control came up. Due to my background I was asked multiple times about my opinion on gun control.
Before I go on let me make this clear. This is my personal view and my view has no relation to the views of my current or past employers.
So is gun control the answer?
I say NO
Why you ask?
Take a look at our drug control laws. Last time I checked meth, cocaine, even pot is still illegal. How hard it it to get any of these street drugs? Last time I checked you need a valid prescription for medications like Vicodin, Oxycodone and even Viagra. These prescription drugs are also readily available to anyone with out seeing a doctor.
Here is the thing. Criminals don’t follow the law. That might be why we call them criminals. Criminals buy things on the black market. If you make something illegal it will not keep it out of the hands of a deranged person. They will still have access via the good old black market.
To enact more gun control laws will do nothing more than add more responsibility to our local police. With that extra responsibility will also come a greater ability for criticizing the police. If after more gun control laws are passed there are additional shootings, the police will be lambasted for not getting all the guns off the streets.
Now I hope I am not contradicting myself here but we do need some gun sales controls. A few years ago my brother gave me a shotgun for as a present. I did not
Gun Show (Photo credit: M Glasgow)
need this shotgun so I sold it to a buddy. That shotgun was purchased by my brother at a gun show, when he lived in Ohio. Meaning that shotgun is likely still registered to someone who may or may-not still live in Ohio.
Person to person sales have zero regulation in this country. We have people in this country that by law should not be allowed to buy a gun (Person convicted of felonies and domestic violence crimes). Yet they can and do buy guns via person to person sale. When you bypass the gun store there are no mandatory background checks and no waiting periods.
The only real gun control law I see as worth it would be to require all weapons to be licensed and all sales to require the use of someone with an FFL (Federal Firearms License). You can still make person to person sales but the actual sale needs to be processed by a gun store.
What I am imagining would be that many gun stores would also offer a gun brokrage. I want to sell a gun to my buddy. We both goto the store and fill out the paperwork to officially transfer the gun to him. The store holds the gun for the waiting period and then he goes back to collect the gun. Obviously there would be a brokrage fee associated with the sale.
We could then also have owner responsibility laws. If I chose to sell a gun to someone with out going through a broker and if that gun is ever used in a crime, I can be charged criminally also. Keeping a more accurate database of who owns what gun should help keep some small percentage of weapons out of the hands of criminals.
I freely admit that my area of expertise is in collection of evidence at a crime scene. I am not an overall expert in the root causes of crime and why criminals do what they do. But logically it seems to be that more gun control in the form of outlawing guns will have just as much effect as the laws that make drugs illegal. More laws will not keep the guns out of the hands of criminals, and just burden the police some more.
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