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this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2024
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I'm pretty sure the massive amount of gun violence is what scares people, not terms that aren't used by the military.
In fact, from what I've seen, the people who really care about technical terms are the ones who want to find them to get around gun regulations or stop them from happening in the first place.
I can't tell you how many times I've been told that there's no such thing as an assault weapon when there was an assault weapon ban in law, meaning there clearly is whether or not some people don't accept that as a technically valid term.
The term "assault weapon" is being used by people who know nothing about firearms to refer to anything that isn't an old bolt action these days.
Its meaningless
And yet "assault weapons" were still banned. So it sounds like it worked out until that ban expired.
Still didn't stop mass shootings or gun crime in general.
I'm in favor of stuff like universal background checks and meaningful regulations, but vague definitions are problematic: Even when the "assault weapon" ban was in place, there was no shortage of functionally identical long guns available that were not classed as "assault weapons".
Much like with passing Internet laws written by ignorant people, gun laws written by ignorant people can result in laws that give people a false sense of safety and worse.
We need to start electing people who are willing to admit they don't know everything but are willing to learn before passing laws on any given subject, otherwise these problems aren't going anywhere. Taking money out of politics it the other part of that, but both of these things are uphill battles.
It sure helped.
https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/press/dem/releases/studies-gun-massacre-deaths-dropped-during-assault-weapons-ban-increased-after-expiration
"Universal" background checks are a terrible idea that sounds pretty good at first glance. The only way they could be reasonably implemented is by assuming a check was performed until conclusively proven that it was not.
For example, I was once surprised to realize that the serial number on the gun I had been carrying for several weeks did not match the serial number on my purchase records. Turns out that I had inadvertantly swapped my Glock 17 for my brother's identical Glock 17 at the range at some point.
My brother and I had conducted a transfer without a background check. A completely inoffensive, functionally irrelevant transfer, but a transfer nonetheless. To actually be considered "universal", the kind of "transfer" we performed would have to be unlawful.
I can provide dozens of examples of guns innocently trading hands without actually constituting a sale. Suffice it to say, inoffensive, usually temporary exchanges of possession between trusted individuals comprise the overwhelming majority of all transfers. "Universal" (Mandated) background checks just cast FUD on these innocent exchanges.
We already almost have a near-universal background check system, which would effectively criminalize all transfers to prohibited persons, without criminalizing any inoffensive transfers. We have already banned transfers to prohibited persons, but that ban is not effective, because it can only be enforced in cases where the transferor "knew" or "should have known" the transferee was a prohibited person.
The problem is that there is no system in place for the transferor to actually know. NICS is not available to the general public. So, any transferor can just claim "I didn't know, and couldn't have known", and he is exonerated.
Implement feasible, publicly-accessible access to NICS, and that transferor can no longer make that claim. He could have known, and he should have known, so whether he actually knew the buyer was a felon is irrelevant. The state merely needs to prove that if a background check had been done at the time of transfer, it would have flagged the buyer.