How banks finance mass shootings
December 24, 2018 12:03 PM Subscribe
A New York Times examination of mass shootings since the Virginia Tech attack in 2007 reveals how credit cards have become a crucial part of the planning of these massacres. There have been 13 shootings that killed 10 or more people in the last decade, and in at least eight of them, the killers financed their attacks using credit cards. Some used credit to acquire firearms they could not otherwise have afforded.
That is an interesting notion though, what would a "black credit" market look like? I am assuming there are already some similarities, but if all credit were to be outlawed in a nation, would this change?
Apologies if this makes no sense, I am just thinking out loud while distracting myself from Christmas movies.
posted by infide1castr0 at 12:27 PM on December 24, 2018 [1 favorite]
Apologies if this makes no sense, I am just thinking out loud while distracting myself from Christmas movies.
posted by infide1castr0 at 12:27 PM on December 24, 2018 [1 favorite]
Re: privacy and credit card payments, in the last year I’ve been called by my credit card company asking to verify credit card purchases for unusual online purchases, tanks of gas out of the country, a tuition payment, and snow tires. It seems like a no brainer to flag someone who buys 6 firearms at once.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 12:28 PM on December 24, 2018 [73 favorites]
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 12:28 PM on December 24, 2018 [73 favorites]
Some used credit to acquire firearms they could not otherwise have afforded.
Ah, that must be it! I’d been wondering why America has constant mass shootings, when the rest of the world doesn’t. Probably it’s the easy access to cheap consumer credit.
posted by chappell, ambrose at 12:35 PM on December 24, 2018 [88 favorites]
Ah, that must be it! I’d been wondering why America has constant mass shootings, when the rest of the world doesn’t. Probably it’s the easy access to cheap consumer credit.
posted by chappell, ambrose at 12:35 PM on December 24, 2018 [88 favorites]
Flag them for potential fraud? After which they say “yep I made that purchase, put it through” and all is well?
Not that I support any part of the gun situation in the US, but I do feel (some) sympathy for the credit card issuers’ position. If it’s legal and a-ok by the law, why should they stop it? Let alone enforce completely new reporting and recording procedures to capture the bahaviour. That sounds like a great place for lawmakers to start...
Then again, from what I understand, they are all sorts of ok with not allowing payments for certain (legal) adult services/content online, so maybe they can just get fucked.
posted by Jobst at 12:40 PM on December 24, 2018 [14 favorites]
Not that I support any part of the gun situation in the US, but I do feel (some) sympathy for the credit card issuers’ position. If it’s legal and a-ok by the law, why should they stop it? Let alone enforce completely new reporting and recording procedures to capture the bahaviour. That sounds like a great place for lawmakers to start...
Then again, from what I understand, they are all sorts of ok with not allowing payments for certain (legal) adult services/content online, so maybe they can just get fucked.
posted by Jobst at 12:40 PM on December 24, 2018 [14 favorites]
Banks already report accounts for potential terrorist and money laundering activity. I suspect the primary barrier is a lack of regulation.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 12:44 PM on December 24, 2018 [18 favorites]
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 12:44 PM on December 24, 2018 [18 favorites]
Banks already report accounts for potential terrorist and money laundering activity.
Yes. Unless it’s the bank itself involved in terrorism and money laundering.
posted by You Stay 'Ere An Make Sure 'E Doesn't Leave at 1:09 PM on December 24, 2018 [8 favorites]
Yes. Unless it’s the bank itself involved in terrorism and money laundering.
posted by You Stay 'Ere An Make Sure 'E Doesn't Leave at 1:09 PM on December 24, 2018 [8 favorites]
I feel like I've heard stories about bank accounts being shut down on the mere suspicion of sex work — and if that's true, I don't see why "suspicion of intent to commit mass murder" couldn't fall into the same category.
Am I confused? Am I remembering wrong?
posted by nebulawindphone at 1:34 PM on December 24, 2018 [14 favorites]
Am I confused? Am I remembering wrong?
posted by nebulawindphone at 1:34 PM on December 24, 2018 [14 favorites]
In several states, it's not legal to buy lottery tickets with a credit card.
posted by gimonca at 1:59 PM on December 24, 2018 [10 favorites]
posted by gimonca at 1:59 PM on December 24, 2018 [10 favorites]
I think it would be a lot easier to flag people who might be going nuts by -- instead of scrutinizing credit card records -- we implement national-level controls on licensing and registration.
A single FFL for everyone who wants to buy a gun. I say go all out and have an annual physical and mental health screening like the FAA uses for pilots.
Mandatory registration of every legally owned firearm to a FFL holder.
Make it a 20-to-life crime to transfer a firearm to an unlicensed person.
So, with this system, the BATFE or whatever would see Joe Nutjob buying a bunch of guns without the whole credit card system being involved.
So in addition to the rigorous serial # tracking from manufacturer though distributor through retail outlet, we extend that to the retail purchaser AND any subsequent transactions.
posted by mikelieman at 2:04 PM on December 24, 2018 [6 favorites]
A single FFL for everyone who wants to buy a gun. I say go all out and have an annual physical and mental health screening like the FAA uses for pilots.
Mandatory registration of every legally owned firearm to a FFL holder.
Make it a 20-to-life crime to transfer a firearm to an unlicensed person.
So, with this system, the BATFE or whatever would see Joe Nutjob buying a bunch of guns without the whole credit card system being involved.
So in addition to the rigorous serial # tracking from manufacturer though distributor through retail outlet, we extend that to the retail purchaser AND any subsequent transactions.
posted by mikelieman at 2:04 PM on December 24, 2018 [6 favorites]
Yeah, okay, that's fair. The idea of companies flagging shooty-looking transactions is appealing because we've all started assuming the government isn't going to do shit, but it's not like it's actually the best way to handle this.
posted by nebulawindphone at 2:06 PM on December 24, 2018 [5 favorites]
posted by nebulawindphone at 2:06 PM on December 24, 2018 [5 favorites]
Have we considered the role of pants in mass shootings? Approximately 100% of mass shooters have worn pants. Without pants, their legs presumably would have been cold, and they may have chosen to stay at home and drink hot cocoa instead of commit atrocities. NYT if you're reading this, we need an exposé.
We love to blame every every stupid tangential aspect of this monstrous situation except for the obvious, that rapid fire, high-powered guns should be flat out illegal. If we still want to cling to the second amendment, there are guns that will work for hunting and self-defense that can't kill 20 people in a minute in a packed nightclub: manual action rifles, shotguns, revolvers. This article appears to be laying groundwork to suggest mass AI surveillance of credit card purchases is a nice way to precog mass shootings. Never mind the very high false positive rate or the privacy implications.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 2:12 PM on December 24, 2018 [68 favorites]
We love to blame every every stupid tangential aspect of this monstrous situation except for the obvious, that rapid fire, high-powered guns should be flat out illegal. If we still want to cling to the second amendment, there are guns that will work for hunting and self-defense that can't kill 20 people in a minute in a packed nightclub: manual action rifles, shotguns, revolvers. This article appears to be laying groundwork to suggest mass AI surveillance of credit card purchases is a nice way to precog mass shootings. Never mind the very high false positive rate or the privacy implications.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 2:12 PM on December 24, 2018 [68 favorites]
Yes, I agree, the real problem is guns. We need to deal with the guns.
But, and this is a big but, there is a problem in that the courts have maintained that the Second Amendment basically means "People can own all the guns, and nobody can stop them," so until we have new caselaw that actually enforces the "well regulated militia" part of the Second Amendment, we have to find workarounds. So, let's go after the damn credit card companies in the interim.
posted by SansPoint at 2:24 PM on December 24, 2018 [6 favorites]
But, and this is a big but, there is a problem in that the courts have maintained that the Second Amendment basically means "People can own all the guns, and nobody can stop them," so until we have new caselaw that actually enforces the "well regulated militia" part of the Second Amendment, we have to find workarounds. So, let's go after the damn credit card companies in the interim.
posted by SansPoint at 2:24 PM on December 24, 2018 [6 favorites]
Just moved from California with the most restrictive gun laws in the USA to an open carry state where you can walk in to a sporting goods store and after a 10m "background check," walk out with as many guns as you like. Gotta say, it's a trip to walk down the cereal aisle in a supermarket and some Mom with a toddler in the cart has a ratchet strapped.
Aren't there already records of all gun purchases with credit cards, cash, whatever?
posted by CrowGoat at 2:30 PM on December 24, 2018
Aren't there already records of all gun purchases with credit cards, cash, whatever?
posted by CrowGoat at 2:30 PM on December 24, 2018
I get where they're coming from, but it's too soon to politicize consumer credit.
posted by peeedro at 2:33 PM on December 24, 2018 [10 favorites]
posted by peeedro at 2:33 PM on December 24, 2018 [10 favorites]
breaking news credit cards can be used to buy things
posted by Bwentman at 2:42 PM on December 24, 2018 [13 favorites]
posted by Bwentman at 2:42 PM on December 24, 2018 [13 favorites]
manual action rifles
I understand that, but is it not true that assault rifles are already outlawed? Even the AR-15 is semi-automatic, even with a bump stock (which I believe were just outlawed federally). How further could the types of guns themselves be restricted?
posted by infide1castr0 at 2:52 PM on December 24, 2018
I understand that, but is it not true that assault rifles are already outlawed? Even the AR-15 is semi-automatic, even with a bump stock (which I believe were just outlawed federally). How further could the types of guns themselves be restricted?
posted by infide1castr0 at 2:52 PM on December 24, 2018
How further could the types of guns themselves be restricted?
Restrict magazine size, ban handguns, ban semi-automatic weapons. The Constitution was written over 225 years ago--we can just ban everything that wasn't available back then.
posted by Slinga at 2:55 PM on December 24, 2018 [1 favorite]
Restrict magazine size, ban handguns, ban semi-automatic weapons. The Constitution was written over 225 years ago--we can just ban everything that wasn't available back then.
posted by Slinga at 2:55 PM on December 24, 2018 [1 favorite]
Restrict magazine size, ban handguns, ban semi-automatic weapons. The Constitution was written over 225 years ago--we can just ban everything that wasn't available back then.
A lot of those are restricted... but isn't that a strange metric to measure our society by? Twitter wasn't available when the First Amendment was written, but certainly that shouldn't be banned for the same reason, right?
posted by infide1castr0 at 3:02 PM on December 24, 2018 [8 favorites]
A lot of those are restricted... but isn't that a strange metric to measure our society by? Twitter wasn't available when the First Amendment was written, but certainly that shouldn't be banned for the same reason, right?
posted by infide1castr0 at 3:02 PM on December 24, 2018 [8 favorites]
There exists precedent for common sense regulation. Slinga mentions some aspects of what that might look like. The problem is solved in the sense that we know what to do. At this point the problem is totally political, and anybody who wants to split hairs about the feasibility or ontology of any particular aspect of the solution is part of the problem.
To be frank: Nobody in the history of the US has sincerely argued that we should ban everything that didn't exist in 1776, and arguing against that position is ridiculous. On the other hand, a majority of people in the US believe we need more effective gun regulation. So if you're going to argue against gun control, the most honest approach is to argue against *that* position.
posted by dbx at 3:25 PM on December 24, 2018 [3 favorites]
To be frank: Nobody in the history of the US has sincerely argued that we should ban everything that didn't exist in 1776, and arguing against that position is ridiculous. On the other hand, a majority of people in the US believe we need more effective gun regulation. So if you're going to argue against gun control, the most honest approach is to argue against *that* position.
posted by dbx at 3:25 PM on December 24, 2018 [3 favorites]
Nobody in the history of the US has sincerely argued that we should ban everything that didn't exist in 1776
Well, except for the post I was replying to, right? I am not even trying to argue against gun control, I was simply asking what guns would be on the allow and not-allowed lists.
posted by infide1castr0 at 3:28 PM on December 24, 2018 [4 favorites]
Well, except for the post I was replying to, right? I am not even trying to argue against gun control, I was simply asking what guns would be on the allow and not-allowed lists.
posted by infide1castr0 at 3:28 PM on December 24, 2018 [4 favorites]
Of course, people who split hairs about the feasibility of particular regulations are always just asking questions. The answer was given, and you set up a strawman and started to argue against it. I'll just amplify Slinga's answer:
No handguns, no semiautomatic rifles, and restrict magazine size.
That's the answer to your question: How further could the types of guns themselves be restricted?
This conversation is likely to only get less productive from here, so in the interest of the mods' sanity during the holidays, I'll consider my point made and keep quiet from here.
posted by dbx at 3:38 PM on December 24, 2018 [9 favorites]
No handguns, no semiautomatic rifles, and restrict magazine size.
That's the answer to your question: How further could the types of guns themselves be restricted?
This conversation is likely to only get less productive from here, so in the interest of the mods' sanity during the holidays, I'll consider my point made and keep quiet from here.
posted by dbx at 3:38 PM on December 24, 2018 [9 favorites]
I was simply asking what guns would be on the allow and not-allowed lists.
Guns that can't keep up a sustained high rate of fire. Gun people can probably suggest better options, but allowing only guns that meet these two criteria seems like a good start:
1. Each shot requires a manual action (e.g., bolt action or hammer cock)
2. Don't accept a magazine, such that reloading is much slower and capacity is limited. For example, a revolver or a double barreled shotgun.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 3:40 PM on December 24, 2018 [3 favorites]
Guns that can't keep up a sustained high rate of fire. Gun people can probably suggest better options, but allowing only guns that meet these two criteria seems like a good start:
1. Each shot requires a manual action (e.g., bolt action or hammer cock)
2. Don't accept a magazine, such that reloading is much slower and capacity is limited. For example, a revolver or a double barreled shotgun.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 3:40 PM on December 24, 2018 [3 favorites]
Sorry you think it was only a strawman, I was simply replying to the comment The Constitution was written over 225 years ago--we can just ban everything that wasn't available back then. Forgive me if that was uncalled for.
And I am sincerely just trying to ask questions, I do not really understand why questioning the feasibility of legislation would be considered "just splitting hairs"... legislation should maintain a feasible character, shouldn't it? I was really just trying to have a conversation about it mate, I enjoy hearing either side of the issue and perhaps I play devil's advocate a little too heavily, I did just join the site and perhaps am acting out of line and if that is the case I apologise and if you do continue to retain your silence, I hope you have a happy holidays.
1. Each shot requires a manual action (e.g., bolt action or hammer cock)
Yeah I can see that working, but as far as I understood most guns to work today, that is how they work, I am not a gun owner, but I have not seen any gun on the market currently that can continue to fire with the trigger just held down (unless it is military-issued). But that would makes sense to me, even if you can pull a trigger pretty quickly, maybe a mechanism that requires a "cool-down" period between shots? Though I am uncertain how that mechanically would work out.
posted by infide1castr0 at 3:46 PM on December 24, 2018
And I am sincerely just trying to ask questions, I do not really understand why questioning the feasibility of legislation would be considered "just splitting hairs"... legislation should maintain a feasible character, shouldn't it? I was really just trying to have a conversation about it mate, I enjoy hearing either side of the issue and perhaps I play devil's advocate a little too heavily, I did just join the site and perhaps am acting out of line and if that is the case I apologise and if you do continue to retain your silence, I hope you have a happy holidays.
1. Each shot requires a manual action (e.g., bolt action or hammer cock)
Yeah I can see that working, but as far as I understood most guns to work today, that is how they work, I am not a gun owner, but I have not seen any gun on the market currently that can continue to fire with the trigger just held down (unless it is military-issued). But that would makes sense to me, even if you can pull a trigger pretty quickly, maybe a mechanism that requires a "cool-down" period between shots? Though I am uncertain how that mechanically would work out.
posted by infide1castr0 at 3:46 PM on December 24, 2018
what guns would be on the allow and not-allowed lists.
In the spirit of Christmas, let’s assume that you’re not being wildly disingenuous. In the UK, it’s relatively easy to get a license for a double-barrelled shotgun if you’re not in a household with anyone who has an arrest record or any history of mental health issues. (Although the local police will come and check it / you / your family every year, examine your gun safe, etc.) .22 bolt action rifles are difficult to get hold of, and you’ll need to supply an affirmative reason that you need one. You’re not allowed anything with any magazine capacity at all, so pump action shotguns that take more than three shells are out, same for any kind of rifle with a magazine. Handguns are completely banned, and even if you’re an olympic athlete, you’ll need to go and train in France. Own something that you’re not supposed to, and you can look forward to a very lengthy prison sentence if caught. You could use that as a model, if you wanted!
posted by chappell, ambrose at 3:48 PM on December 24, 2018 [28 favorites]
In the spirit of Christmas, let’s assume that you’re not being wildly disingenuous. In the UK, it’s relatively easy to get a license for a double-barrelled shotgun if you’re not in a household with anyone who has an arrest record or any history of mental health issues. (Although the local police will come and check it / you / your family every year, examine your gun safe, etc.) .22 bolt action rifles are difficult to get hold of, and you’ll need to supply an affirmative reason that you need one. You’re not allowed anything with any magazine capacity at all, so pump action shotguns that take more than three shells are out, same for any kind of rifle with a magazine. Handguns are completely banned, and even if you’re an olympic athlete, you’ll need to go and train in France. Own something that you’re not supposed to, and you can look forward to a very lengthy prison sentence if caught. You could use that as a model, if you wanted!
posted by chappell, ambrose at 3:48 PM on December 24, 2018 [28 favorites]
Yeah I can see that working, but as far as I understood most guns to work today, that is how they work, I am not a gun owner, but I have not seen any gun on the market currently that can continue to fire with the trigger just held down
I should have been more clear, what I meant is "a manual action to chamber the next round". So, more work than just pulling the trigger. No semi-automatics.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 3:50 PM on December 24, 2018 [1 favorite]
I should have been more clear, what I meant is "a manual action to chamber the next round". So, more work than just pulling the trigger. No semi-automatics.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 3:50 PM on December 24, 2018 [1 favorite]
(When I say “double barrelled shotguns are relatively easy to get hold of” I mean that you still have to do a lengthy licensing process to receive your shotgun certificate, you’ll be on a central registry, you’ll receive regular visits from law enforcement to make sure that you continue to be a responsible owner. It’s just that it’s unlikely to be refused, if you jump through all of the hoops and haven’t been arrested. Merry Christmas!)
posted by chappell, ambrose at 3:52 PM on December 24, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by chappell, ambrose at 3:52 PM on December 24, 2018 [3 favorites]
In the spirit of Christmas, let’s assume that you’re not being wildly disingenuous.
I appreciate it mate, and that is a very detailed answer, but can that be applied to the US model easily? Perhaps I am not reading enough on it, but I do not see how a buyback or any other tool to implement a system similar to this would be able to work with the Second Amendment in place. Sorry if you think this is me trying to purposefully be provocative.
I should have been more clear, what I meant is "a manual action to chamber the next round". So, more work than just pulling the trigger. No semi-automatics.
Ah, apologies for the misunderstanding... That would be a hard sell to a lot of gun owners and manufacturers I imagine, but I wonder what it would take for political opinion to shift in that way against the lobby groups and such. Could be called the Flintlock Bloc or something in Congress haha
posted by infide1castr0 at 3:56 PM on December 24, 2018
I appreciate it mate, and that is a very detailed answer, but can that be applied to the US model easily? Perhaps I am not reading enough on it, but I do not see how a buyback or any other tool to implement a system similar to this would be able to work with the Second Amendment in place. Sorry if you think this is me trying to purposefully be provocative.
I should have been more clear, what I meant is "a manual action to chamber the next round". So, more work than just pulling the trigger. No semi-automatics.
Ah, apologies for the misunderstanding... That would be a hard sell to a lot of gun owners and manufacturers I imagine, but I wonder what it would take for political opinion to shift in that way against the lobby groups and such. Could be called the Flintlock Bloc or something in Congress haha
posted by infide1castr0 at 3:56 PM on December 24, 2018
I enjoy hearing either side of the issue and perhaps I play devil's advocate a little too heavily
that doesn't go over well here
posted by poffin boffin at 4:12 PM on December 24, 2018 [18 favorites]
that doesn't go over well here
posted by poffin boffin at 4:12 PM on December 24, 2018 [18 favorites]
Mod note: Heya, welcome to Metafilter infide1castr0. We've had an awful lot of gun control discussions here over the years, so there's some background here that you're possibly stepping into unawares and coming across in a way you don't intend. Devil's advocacy from a new person on a hot topic can come across as needling or trolling. But in any case, I'm going to gently nudge folks back towards the article about banks or credit cards' role here, and away from the more general "gun control: discuss" stuff.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 4:14 PM on December 24, 2018 [16 favorites]
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 4:14 PM on December 24, 2018 [16 favorites]
Fair, apologies to anyone I may have upset or lines I might have crossed... Glad to be part of a nice community though, I will go back and read some of the gun control archives as I am certainly far from an expert.
Happy Holidays, all
posted by infide1castr0 at 4:21 PM on December 24, 2018 [13 favorites]
Happy Holidays, all
posted by infide1castr0 at 4:21 PM on December 24, 2018 [13 favorites]
Yeah it's a shame this thread has been kind of consumed with reflexive snark about shooters wearing pants or whatever. When I saw the headline - and to be fair it's a bad headline - I was tempted to dismiss this out of hand. But it's actually an interesting idea.
Just to sort of lay out my reasoning: there are, in my opinion, two big lies in the US gun control debate. One lie is that it's possible to write effective gun control legislation without repealing the 2nd amendment. Another lie is that repealing the 2nd amendment would be ineffective in reducing our murder rate and nearly eliminating mass shootings.
The reality as I see it is that this country is not going to repeal the 2nd amendment any time soon. Therefore if anyone can actually find effective measures at preventing mass shootings it would behoove us to look into it.
One of the conversations I have about these events is that there's generally not a lot law enforcement can do before someone starts pulling the trigger. The internet is awash in an unending torrent of infinite threats of violence. A percent of a percent of a percent actually result in violence. The finite resources of law enforcement in the US are already past capacity handling violence that's already occurred, we simply don't have people available to chase down every internet tough guy that likes pushing buttons. And if we did have those resources, what would we be able to do if we actually found them? What crime have they committed? Would anyone seriously support holding someone in jail pending a trial for some sort of misdemeanor disorderly conduct trial? I could go on but basically it seems to me that the barriers to preventing an attack are nearly insurmountable without some sort of concrete physical evidence that an attack is imminent.
If research established that 90% of these guys spent a few thousand on firearms, all purchased on credit, 14 days or fewer before their attacks, we'd actually potentially have a mechanism we could act on. Possibly. It would sort of depend on what the daily volume of people spending $5k+ on firearms on credit is. It could be circumvented by people converting credit to physical currency. Etc. I can see a lot of potential difficulties with the idea but it's worth at least looking in to.
posted by firebrick at 4:46 PM on December 24, 2018 [8 favorites]
Just to sort of lay out my reasoning: there are, in my opinion, two big lies in the US gun control debate. One lie is that it's possible to write effective gun control legislation without repealing the 2nd amendment. Another lie is that repealing the 2nd amendment would be ineffective in reducing our murder rate and nearly eliminating mass shootings.
The reality as I see it is that this country is not going to repeal the 2nd amendment any time soon. Therefore if anyone can actually find effective measures at preventing mass shootings it would behoove us to look into it.
One of the conversations I have about these events is that there's generally not a lot law enforcement can do before someone starts pulling the trigger. The internet is awash in an unending torrent of infinite threats of violence. A percent of a percent of a percent actually result in violence. The finite resources of law enforcement in the US are already past capacity handling violence that's already occurred, we simply don't have people available to chase down every internet tough guy that likes pushing buttons. And if we did have those resources, what would we be able to do if we actually found them? What crime have they committed? Would anyone seriously support holding someone in jail pending a trial for some sort of misdemeanor disorderly conduct trial? I could go on but basically it seems to me that the barriers to preventing an attack are nearly insurmountable without some sort of concrete physical evidence that an attack is imminent.
If research established that 90% of these guys spent a few thousand on firearms, all purchased on credit, 14 days or fewer before their attacks, we'd actually potentially have a mechanism we could act on. Possibly. It would sort of depend on what the daily volume of people spending $5k+ on firearms on credit is. It could be circumvented by people converting credit to physical currency. Etc. I can see a lot of potential difficulties with the idea but it's worth at least looking in to.
posted by firebrick at 4:46 PM on December 24, 2018 [8 favorites]
One of the most irritating talking points of the American gun nut is the idea you can’t just own a firearm in the socialist hellhole of Europe.
I was at one time a sport shooter. Owing to my red neck family roots.
I’ve bird hunted in Scotland. I hunted wild boar in northern Italy (deliberately unsuccessfully). I’ve target shot an AK in the Czech Republic.
All these firearms activities are highly regulated but nothing like impossible.
What America has is absurdly casual access to firearms. And that has lead to an entitled and delusional gun culture. It’s to the point where even the slightest regulation sparks a paranoid moral panic. Gun culture now bears no resemblance to the sporting culture I grew up with. And I fear that culture is heading nowhere good.
posted by You Stay 'Ere An Make Sure 'E Doesn't Leave at 4:54 PM on December 24, 2018 [37 favorites]
I was at one time a sport shooter. Owing to my red neck family roots.
I’ve bird hunted in Scotland. I hunted wild boar in northern Italy (deliberately unsuccessfully). I’ve target shot an AK in the Czech Republic.
All these firearms activities are highly regulated but nothing like impossible.
What America has is absurdly casual access to firearms. And that has lead to an entitled and delusional gun culture. It’s to the point where even the slightest regulation sparks a paranoid moral panic. Gun culture now bears no resemblance to the sporting culture I grew up with. And I fear that culture is heading nowhere good.
posted by You Stay 'Ere An Make Sure 'E Doesn't Leave at 4:54 PM on December 24, 2018 [37 favorites]
Restrict magazine size, ban handguns, ban semi-automatic weapons. The Constitution was written over 225 years ago--we can just ban everything that wasn't available back then.
Like the internet? And automobiles? And credit cards (see FPP)? The "military arms" of the day were what the citizenry were guaranteed the right to own. Certainly the "ban everything" model worked well with alcohol.
posted by Gilgamesh's Chauffeur at 4:55 PM on December 24, 2018 [1 favorite]
Like the internet? And automobiles? And credit cards (see FPP)? The "military arms" of the day were what the citizenry were guaranteed the right to own. Certainly the "ban everything" model worked well with alcohol.
posted by Gilgamesh's Chauffeur at 4:55 PM on December 24, 2018 [1 favorite]
And that has lead to an entitled and delusional gun culture.
That is probably a crux of the matter... and cultural shifts are hard to move, though, and to get a bit back to the article at hand, I believe studying the funding and access to said firearms, regardless of the culture they are purchased in, is an important first step to work within the confines of the nation state.
posted by infide1castr0 at 4:58 PM on December 24, 2018 [2 favorites]
That is probably a crux of the matter... and cultural shifts are hard to move, though, and to get a bit back to the article at hand, I believe studying the funding and access to said firearms, regardless of the culture they are purchased in, is an important first step to work within the confines of the nation state.
posted by infide1castr0 at 4:58 PM on December 24, 2018 [2 favorites]
And when somebody does a $450 cash out on a CC / ATM at 3AM; it should be flagged for a potential drug purchase or robbery?
Still big on the license to own a gun - this would be an opportunity for any potential purchaser to interact and engage with other people for a 6-8 hour class. Not the best way to 'flag' a potential nut case (to say the least), but as things are now; like it's been written; a form, a small payment, 10 minutes time; ...and a person leaves the gun store as easily as a drunk can leave a liquor store with a fresh handle of whiskey.
There are no solutions. Alcohol and tobacco kill 1,500 a day - this too is preventable; yet four and five time DUI professionals are regularly turned loose to drive once again. It is however; a unique datapoint that bears mention during any conversation.
posted by Afghan Stan at 5:25 PM on December 24, 2018 [3 favorites]
Still big on the license to own a gun - this would be an opportunity for any potential purchaser to interact and engage with other people for a 6-8 hour class. Not the best way to 'flag' a potential nut case (to say the least), but as things are now; like it's been written; a form, a small payment, 10 minutes time; ...and a person leaves the gun store as easily as a drunk can leave a liquor store with a fresh handle of whiskey.
There are no solutions. Alcohol and tobacco kill 1,500 a day - this too is preventable; yet four and five time DUI professionals are regularly turned loose to drive once again. It is however; a unique datapoint that bears mention during any conversation.
posted by Afghan Stan at 5:25 PM on December 24, 2018 [3 favorites]
Hey remember back in the old days when Wikileaks was a organization opposing Bush imperialism and Middle-eastern dictators' regimes, instead of a tool of oligarchical oppression, and all the credit card companies refused to process donations from individual supporters going to Wikileaks?
posted by glonous keming at 5:41 PM on December 24, 2018 [8 favorites]
posted by glonous keming at 5:41 PM on December 24, 2018 [8 favorites]
It’d be an interesting exercise in consumer choice for a bank to offer a credit card you can’t use to purchase guns with. They might find it’s a niche which attracts people who wish to make a statement with how they spend their money. Obviously someone who wanted to buy guns wouldn’t get one of here but all the same it could be an effective consciousness raiser in the ethical consumption domain.
posted by Rumple at 6:00 PM on December 24, 2018
posted by Rumple at 6:00 PM on December 24, 2018
This strikes me as a really bad idea. I don't want my bank trying to figure out what I'm doing to decide if I'm dangerous. Gun control, to the extent we want it, should be implemented by uniform government policy, not corporate surveillance.
It seems unlikely to prevent actual mass shootings. Hell, would-be shooters could just max out their cash advance limit and pay cash for the guns/ammo. Or buy ammo somewhere that sells non-ammo things, like Wal-Mart. Or buy a cheap used AR-15 for $500 plus $50 in ammo, which could easily suffice to carry out a record-breaking mass shooting. Hell, a decent marksman could kill a few dozen innocent people with a bolt action 22. I realize mass shooters have sometimes used fancy weapons, but you really, really don't need one to do a lot of damage.
As long as guns can be purchased as easily as they now can in the US, there is limited hope for stopping mass shootings. I really dislike how quickly people jump to poorly thought-through solutions with high potential for abuse. It reminds of me of the "due process be damned—BECAUSE TERRORISM" attitude that rammed through the Patriot act and extraordinary rendition in the early aughts.
posted by andrewpcone at 6:51 PM on December 24, 2018 [11 favorites]
It seems unlikely to prevent actual mass shootings. Hell, would-be shooters could just max out their cash advance limit and pay cash for the guns/ammo. Or buy ammo somewhere that sells non-ammo things, like Wal-Mart. Or buy a cheap used AR-15 for $500 plus $50 in ammo, which could easily suffice to carry out a record-breaking mass shooting. Hell, a decent marksman could kill a few dozen innocent people with a bolt action 22. I realize mass shooters have sometimes used fancy weapons, but you really, really don't need one to do a lot of damage.
As long as guns can be purchased as easily as they now can in the US, there is limited hope for stopping mass shootings. I really dislike how quickly people jump to poorly thought-through solutions with high potential for abuse. It reminds of me of the "due process be damned—BECAUSE TERRORISM" attitude that rammed through the Patriot act and extraordinary rendition in the early aughts.
posted by andrewpcone at 6:51 PM on December 24, 2018 [11 favorites]
Anything that lets you kill people at a rate which would have required an artillery piece in the late 1700s, at least, ought to be banned. I refuse to believe that there aren't already many systems for calculating a composite relative lethality rating for a weapon, developed both by militaries themselves and by the marketing departments of arms manufacturers.
There seems to be a great deal of confusion regarding what kinds of weapons would have been available at the time the Bill of Rights was written. I watched a debate in which the guy arguing the pro-gun side claimed that fully automatic hand-held weapons were available. But as far as I can tell just cartridge ammunition for non-repeating firearms wasn't invented until the early 19th century.
It's all pretty stupid anyways, though. If “freedom of the press” and “freedom of speech” are compatible with an international intellectual property regime where police can bust down someone's door in Sweden and seize their web servers because they're publishing hyperlinks pointing to other places online that one can find a copyrighted work made by someone in Hollywood (as long as it's not a black guy whose creative work is a popular dance move, acourse) then pretty much the rules from any gun control system that has already been worked out and successfully applied elsewhere in the world is going to be compatible with the Second Amendment.
It's the U.S. firearms industry and the money-is-speech-is-political-power, which is the thing incompatible with successful gun control practices the world over that might otherwise be easily replicated here.
posted by XMLicious at 6:58 PM on December 24, 2018 [1 favorite]
There seems to be a great deal of confusion regarding what kinds of weapons would have been available at the time the Bill of Rights was written. I watched a debate in which the guy arguing the pro-gun side claimed that fully automatic hand-held weapons were available. But as far as I can tell just cartridge ammunition for non-repeating firearms wasn't invented until the early 19th century.
It's all pretty stupid anyways, though. If “freedom of the press” and “freedom of speech” are compatible with an international intellectual property regime where police can bust down someone's door in Sweden and seize their web servers because they're publishing hyperlinks pointing to other places online that one can find a copyrighted work made by someone in Hollywood (as long as it's not a black guy whose creative work is a popular dance move, acourse) then pretty much the rules from any gun control system that has already been worked out and successfully applied elsewhere in the world is going to be compatible with the Second Amendment.
It's the U.S. firearms industry and the money-is-speech-is-political-power, which is the thing incompatible with successful gun control practices the world over that might otherwise be easily replicated here.
posted by XMLicious at 6:58 PM on December 24, 2018 [1 favorite]
Aren't there already records of all gun purchases with credit cards, cash, whatever?
How could there be? You can walk into a Walmart and buy a gun along side your cart of groceries. To the credit card company, it's just a typical Walmart sale.
Record keeping is practically non-existent -- intentionally by law. The purchaser of a gun from a dealer must fill out a form ATF 4473. This form is used for the instant background check. The applicant puts their name, age and address but they explicitly are not required to put their social security number. This most critical identifier in the U.S. is completely optional. Then you check Y/N on a few questions such as "Are you a fugitive from justice?" and "Are you adjudicated as mentally defective?" Ha!
And you don't even indicate what weapon you are buying. There is just a checkbox for handgun or long gun -- which could be absolutely anything. The records indicate neither what gun you are buying nor how many guns you are buying.
After the ATF does a quick computerized check which may take a few minutes, you are free to walk away with your new guns. But get this -- the ATF is required by law to destroy all of the data from your background check within 24 hours. It is as if your purchase never happened. It is disappeared.
The local seller is required to keep a paper copy of your purchase for 20 years, but that doesn't do law enforcement much good since there are 60,000 firearms dealers. If law enforcement wants to trace a gun, they have to go to every shop and tediously paw through their millions of paper files to find a record of a gun sale. There are no digital records of sales required.
And that just goes for licensed dealers. If you are a private seller of your guns, forget all the above. You don't need to make any background checks or keep any record of your sales at all.
It's a total joke, thanks to the lobbyists of the NRA (and the Russians).
posted by JackFlash at 7:54 PM on December 24, 2018 [9 favorites]
How could there be? You can walk into a Walmart and buy a gun along side your cart of groceries. To the credit card company, it's just a typical Walmart sale.
Record keeping is practically non-existent -- intentionally by law. The purchaser of a gun from a dealer must fill out a form ATF 4473. This form is used for the instant background check. The applicant puts their name, age and address but they explicitly are not required to put their social security number. This most critical identifier in the U.S. is completely optional. Then you check Y/N on a few questions such as "Are you a fugitive from justice?" and "Are you adjudicated as mentally defective?" Ha!
And you don't even indicate what weapon you are buying. There is just a checkbox for handgun or long gun -- which could be absolutely anything. The records indicate neither what gun you are buying nor how many guns you are buying.
After the ATF does a quick computerized check which may take a few minutes, you are free to walk away with your new guns. But get this -- the ATF is required by law to destroy all of the data from your background check within 24 hours. It is as if your purchase never happened. It is disappeared.
The local seller is required to keep a paper copy of your purchase for 20 years, but that doesn't do law enforcement much good since there are 60,000 firearms dealers. If law enforcement wants to trace a gun, they have to go to every shop and tediously paw through their millions of paper files to find a record of a gun sale. There are no digital records of sales required.
And that just goes for licensed dealers. If you are a private seller of your guns, forget all the above. You don't need to make any background checks or keep any record of your sales at all.
It's a total joke, thanks to the lobbyists of the NRA (and the Russians).
posted by JackFlash at 7:54 PM on December 24, 2018 [9 favorites]
I don't want my bank trying to figure out what I'm doing to decide if I'm dangerous.
Tough? Go deposit $9999 every day for a few days and let us know what happens. Banks are already watching you to report possible illegal activity, just not gun related activity.
posted by the agents of KAOS at 7:58 PM on December 24, 2018 [9 favorites]
Tough? Go deposit $9999 every day for a few days and let us know what happens. Banks are already watching you to report possible illegal activity, just not gun related activity.
posted by the agents of KAOS at 7:58 PM on December 24, 2018 [9 favorites]
Well, I generally try not to discuss gun issues on the blue because I know I am in the minority but I had 2 glasses of wine tonight so here it goes.
In the last few years I have purchased >12 firearms and probably more than 6,000 rounds of ammunition. I guess that makes me a "gun nut." I have a small collection of WW1 era early semiautomatic handguns, some hunting firearms, .22 cal guns for cheap plinking and teaching new shooters, some Soviet milsurp and a few pistols and an ar15 that I use for competitions on the few days a year that my work schedule allows me to attend them. I try to shoot every week but I don't always have the time. Handgun shooting is a VERY difficult and perishable skill. If I don't shoot for a month I have to spend time and ammo just to get back to where I used to be. It's a challenge and it consumes most of my disposable income. I suck at it and I love it. It scratches my itches (history, mechanical tinkering, being pedantic about stuff). My New Years resolution was to "be more competetive" in a very broadly defined way. Shooting more competitions was a small part of an overall Nestle Makhno improvement plan. It's been a great year.
Target shooting to me is a meditative, centering experience (albeit a loud one). It is one of the few times a week where I am totally present and focused. It forces me to pay attention to not just my body but my state of mind. I truly believe that shooting has helped me in other aspects of my life and in dealing with stress. I was never an athlete and was always the last one to get put in the game. I'm usually in the bottom 10% at competitions but the comraderie is totally different from the sports I played as a child.
I don't fit the narrative that many people here, and elsewhere, have of gun owners. I'm not a fascist orange man supporter. I love to travel and thanks to a recent Fpp about a Hozier music video I found out that I really like ballet.
I'll stop rambling, first booze since thanksgiving. We need to do something about gun deaths in America and I have some ideas about how to address that but I tend to not engage in the discussion because there are usually some disparaging remarks right off the bat from fellow lefties that paint all gun owners with a big broad brush. It discourages conversation. Also I'm not nearly as well spoken as a lot of mefites and engaging on an issue where I know I am in the minority makes me anxious. Ill stop rambling now. And address the issue at hand.
So, at what point should Visa have turned me in and what should the authorities have done? I have never been arrested. My last run in with the law was a speeding ticket 16 years ago. I am a big fan of all the civil liberties and any authority figure who wants to search my residence without a warrant can sit on a cactus.
posted by nestor_makhno at 10:09 PM on December 24, 2018 [11 favorites]
In the last few years I have purchased >12 firearms and probably more than 6,000 rounds of ammunition. I guess that makes me a "gun nut." I have a small collection of WW1 era early semiautomatic handguns, some hunting firearms, .22 cal guns for cheap plinking and teaching new shooters, some Soviet milsurp and a few pistols and an ar15 that I use for competitions on the few days a year that my work schedule allows me to attend them. I try to shoot every week but I don't always have the time. Handgun shooting is a VERY difficult and perishable skill. If I don't shoot for a month I have to spend time and ammo just to get back to where I used to be. It's a challenge and it consumes most of my disposable income. I suck at it and I love it. It scratches my itches (history, mechanical tinkering, being pedantic about stuff). My New Years resolution was to "be more competetive" in a very broadly defined way. Shooting more competitions was a small part of an overall Nestle Makhno improvement plan. It's been a great year.
Target shooting to me is a meditative, centering experience (albeit a loud one). It is one of the few times a week where I am totally present and focused. It forces me to pay attention to not just my body but my state of mind. I truly believe that shooting has helped me in other aspects of my life and in dealing with stress. I was never an athlete and was always the last one to get put in the game. I'm usually in the bottom 10% at competitions but the comraderie is totally different from the sports I played as a child.
I don't fit the narrative that many people here, and elsewhere, have of gun owners. I'm not a fascist orange man supporter. I love to travel and thanks to a recent Fpp about a Hozier music video I found out that I really like ballet.
I'll stop rambling, first booze since thanksgiving. We need to do something about gun deaths in America and I have some ideas about how to address that but I tend to not engage in the discussion because there are usually some disparaging remarks right off the bat from fellow lefties that paint all gun owners with a big broad brush. It discourages conversation. Also I'm not nearly as well spoken as a lot of mefites and engaging on an issue where I know I am in the minority makes me anxious. Ill stop rambling now. And address the issue at hand.
So, at what point should Visa have turned me in and what should the authorities have done? I have never been arrested. My last run in with the law was a speeding ticket 16 years ago. I am a big fan of all the civil liberties and any authority figure who wants to search my residence without a warrant can sit on a cactus.
posted by nestor_makhno at 10:09 PM on December 24, 2018 [11 favorites]
There is no way politically that the US is going to ban handguns or semiautomatic rifles across the board. It's fantasy, like imagining what things will be like after the Great Revolution or whatever. There would have to be a seismic shift in national politics, and if the mass shootings that have already happened haven't caused that, there's zero reason to think that the next one will, or the next one after that, or after that. It's a tarpit.
Looking at the history of gun legislation in the US, the times when specific bans of weapons with particular features have been passed, they are always ones that are not in widespread use or widely owned. They're weird outliers, generally with a checkered reputation among mainstream gun owners: punt guns (very large shotguns used for unsportingly killing large numbers of waterfowl at once), machine guns, sawed-off shotguns and short-barreled rifles, and more recently, bump stocks. (Even the NRA thinks bump stocks are a bad idea.)
So, unpopularity is basically a precondition if you want to ban a particular type of weapon. Going after guns that are common (and semiautomatic rifles and handguns together probably make up the majority of firearms in the US, so as categories you could hardly pick worse ones to go after) is... not likely to be a successful strategy.
Where to go from there? If you want something that might have a snowball's chance in hell, not just legislatively but also through the inevitable court challenges, licensing is probably a safer bet. I think you could probably construct a licensing regime that would pass a Constitutional challenge, if it was modeled on existing "shall issue" laws and the reasons for refusal to issue were clearly delineated. What won't work is anything that defaults to denial or is vague; the whole thing has to be able to survive strict scrutiny, since it's (by design) a curtailment of an enumerated Constitutional right. Rather than try to dance around this, I think the more successful tactic would be to take it on premise from the beginning, and craft the law appropriately. There are lots of situations where enumerated rights are curtailed by the government for various reasons, so that's not a show-stopper in itself; you just need the justification to be sufficient. I think you could probably get licensure through with the same set of criteria that are on the Form 4473. (I mean, if they're acceptable as criteria for a firearms transfer, it doesn't seem like a huge stretch to say that they're acceptable criteria for ownership.)
Perhaps most importantly, if you did licensure in a way that very clearly and transparently wasn't some sort of backdoor stepping-stone or ratchet mechanism towards confiscation—made easier, ironically, by Heller basically taking it off the table for the foreseeable future—I think you wouldn't run into as much opposition from gun-rights organizations and voters as you might expect. I think there is an increasing understanding among gun enthusiasts that something needs to happen to keep crazy people away from guns; the traditional opposition has largely stemmed from the suspicion that any licensing regime would be merely a figleaf for more draconian controls, not because the average gun owner is necessarily opposed in theory (as various polls will attest, and my personal experience is totally consistent with). Selling it is just demonstrating, basically, that you have nothing else up your sleeve.
If we want to try and push credit card companies not to allow firearms purchases on credit that's... fine, I guess, although there are enough ways to turn lines of credit into cash in the US that it seems unlikely to be effective at preventing mass shootings. (Credit card companies are happy to let you take your card to an ATM and withdraw cash.) I think the only way out of this mess is to work through it and find a compromise, disagreeable as that process may be.
posted by Kadin2048 at 10:27 PM on December 24, 2018 [4 favorites]
Looking at the history of gun legislation in the US, the times when specific bans of weapons with particular features have been passed, they are always ones that are not in widespread use or widely owned. They're weird outliers, generally with a checkered reputation among mainstream gun owners: punt guns (very large shotguns used for unsportingly killing large numbers of waterfowl at once), machine guns, sawed-off shotguns and short-barreled rifles, and more recently, bump stocks. (Even the NRA thinks bump stocks are a bad idea.)
So, unpopularity is basically a precondition if you want to ban a particular type of weapon. Going after guns that are common (and semiautomatic rifles and handguns together probably make up the majority of firearms in the US, so as categories you could hardly pick worse ones to go after) is... not likely to be a successful strategy.
Where to go from there? If you want something that might have a snowball's chance in hell, not just legislatively but also through the inevitable court challenges, licensing is probably a safer bet. I think you could probably construct a licensing regime that would pass a Constitutional challenge, if it was modeled on existing "shall issue" laws and the reasons for refusal to issue were clearly delineated. What won't work is anything that defaults to denial or is vague; the whole thing has to be able to survive strict scrutiny, since it's (by design) a curtailment of an enumerated Constitutional right. Rather than try to dance around this, I think the more successful tactic would be to take it on premise from the beginning, and craft the law appropriately. There are lots of situations where enumerated rights are curtailed by the government for various reasons, so that's not a show-stopper in itself; you just need the justification to be sufficient. I think you could probably get licensure through with the same set of criteria that are on the Form 4473. (I mean, if they're acceptable as criteria for a firearms transfer, it doesn't seem like a huge stretch to say that they're acceptable criteria for ownership.)
Perhaps most importantly, if you did licensure in a way that very clearly and transparently wasn't some sort of backdoor stepping-stone or ratchet mechanism towards confiscation—made easier, ironically, by Heller basically taking it off the table for the foreseeable future—I think you wouldn't run into as much opposition from gun-rights organizations and voters as you might expect. I think there is an increasing understanding among gun enthusiasts that something needs to happen to keep crazy people away from guns; the traditional opposition has largely stemmed from the suspicion that any licensing regime would be merely a figleaf for more draconian controls, not because the average gun owner is necessarily opposed in theory (as various polls will attest, and my personal experience is totally consistent with). Selling it is just demonstrating, basically, that you have nothing else up your sleeve.
If we want to try and push credit card companies not to allow firearms purchases on credit that's... fine, I guess, although there are enough ways to turn lines of credit into cash in the US that it seems unlikely to be effective at preventing mass shootings. (Credit card companies are happy to let you take your card to an ATM and withdraw cash.) I think the only way out of this mess is to work through it and find a compromise, disagreeable as that process may be.
posted by Kadin2048 at 10:27 PM on December 24, 2018 [4 favorites]
We don't need to ban semi-automatic rifles, which are almost universally defectively designed and easily used as NFA regulated machine guns.
We just need to regulate semi-automatic rifles AS machine guns. Access ain't easy, and there's paperwork. That'll dissuade most casual nuts.
posted by mikelieman at 10:28 PM on December 24, 2018 [1 favorite]
We just need to regulate semi-automatic rifles AS machine guns. Access ain't easy, and there's paperwork. That'll dissuade most casual nuts.
posted by mikelieman at 10:28 PM on December 24, 2018 [1 favorite]
LIFECARD .22LR
THE LAST GUN YOU’LL LEAVE BEHIND
"The new standard for Discreet Carry – a folding, single-shot .22LR pistol that’s no bigger than a stack of credit cards. At .5 inches thin and weighing less than 7 ounces, LifeCard will be the last gun you’ll leave behind."
posted by cenoxo at 10:48 PM on December 24, 2018
THE LAST GUN YOU’LL LEAVE BEHIND
"The new standard for Discreet Carry – a folding, single-shot .22LR pistol that’s no bigger than a stack of credit cards. At .5 inches thin and weighing less than 7 ounces, LifeCard will be the last gun you’ll leave behind."
posted by cenoxo at 10:48 PM on December 24, 2018
.22 cal guns for cheap plinking and teaching new shooters
There's an ironic element here, where people who own these guns think of .22s as something like super-BB guns (with the awareness that they can do more damage, but still...'plinkers'), vs. those who are on the far side of the trigger, where .22s and 9mms are as effective as rifles and shotguns combined. I ran those numbers through a spreadsheet and among handguns, .22 and .357 are tied for first in fatalities per incident (34%). For % of total fatalities, 9mm takes the cake (6.13%), even over both shotguns and rifles, and almost twice the next highest handgun, .45 ACP (3.4%). 9mm and .22 combine for 9% of the total fatality count, where all rifles and shotguns add up to 10%.
There is no way politically that the US is going to ban handguns or semiautomatic rifles across the board. It's fantasy, like imagining what things will be like after the Great Revolution or whatever.
I think it's even worse, but unacknowledged, that "cold dead hands" gun owners are fantasizing about killing police officers. The rhetoric is that they need the guns in case Hillary (or other bugbear) comes to take them, but the people who would come to take the guns in reality? Police. Red flag order? Police. Every form of gun reduction is fronted by police.
posted by rhizome at 11:03 PM on December 24, 2018 [3 favorites]
There's an ironic element here, where people who own these guns think of .22s as something like super-BB guns (with the awareness that they can do more damage, but still...'plinkers'), vs. those who are on the far side of the trigger, where .22s and 9mms are as effective as rifles and shotguns combined. I ran those numbers through a spreadsheet and among handguns, .22 and .357 are tied for first in fatalities per incident (34%). For % of total fatalities, 9mm takes the cake (6.13%), even over both shotguns and rifles, and almost twice the next highest handgun, .45 ACP (3.4%). 9mm and .22 combine for 9% of the total fatality count, where all rifles and shotguns add up to 10%.
There is no way politically that the US is going to ban handguns or semiautomatic rifles across the board. It's fantasy, like imagining what things will be like after the Great Revolution or whatever.
I think it's even worse, but unacknowledged, that "cold dead hands" gun owners are fantasizing about killing police officers. The rhetoric is that they need the guns in case Hillary (or other bugbear) comes to take them, but the people who would come to take the guns in reality? Police. Red flag order? Police. Every form of gun reduction is fronted by police.
posted by rhizome at 11:03 PM on December 24, 2018 [3 favorites]
Okay, so... don't our law enforcement authorities already do this sort of thing to monitor patterns in the purchase of explosives, explosive precursors, chemical and biological agent precursors, and related components and processing equipment? And for drug manufacturing? It's probably through a variety of different reporting regulations and mechanisms, but we must already have considerable infrastructure and expertise built up.
And besides that, if you have a mobile phone or a car with RFID chips in its tires, there are probably records of where you go all the time anyways, so between that and financial records all the trips to the shooting range to maintain your very perishable skill which you spend most of your disposable income on, your gun ownership is not some big secret, whether the data analyses assembling it all are marked by our social conventions as “government” or “private.”
And it's just occuring to me off the top of my head... if other LIDAR systems can map the ocean floor and find hidden Mayan pyramids underneath the jungle, can an autonomous vehicle's sensors see your concealed firearm when it passes by you?
Either way: both the objection that practical considerations make it impossible and that it would introduce unprecedented intrusion and hence present legal obstacles do not seem valid to me. The security firms for billionaires and dignitaries are going to be able to do this sort of tracking and correllation and analytics of individual activities if only under the label “private enterprise”.
Our decision is whether we want to pretend it's not going on, to retain the illusory but comforting pretense of personal privacy, or choose as a society to make sure that the average person can avail themselves of the same protections as the rich and powerful do.
posted by XMLicious at 11:18 PM on December 24, 2018
And besides that, if you have a mobile phone or a car with RFID chips in its tires, there are probably records of where you go all the time anyways, so between that and financial records all the trips to the shooting range to maintain your very perishable skill which you spend most of your disposable income on, your gun ownership is not some big secret, whether the data analyses assembling it all are marked by our social conventions as “government” or “private.”
And it's just occuring to me off the top of my head... if other LIDAR systems can map the ocean floor and find hidden Mayan pyramids underneath the jungle, can an autonomous vehicle's sensors see your concealed firearm when it passes by you?
Either way: both the objection that practical considerations make it impossible and that it would introduce unprecedented intrusion and hence present legal obstacles do not seem valid to me. The security firms for billionaires and dignitaries are going to be able to do this sort of tracking and correllation and analytics of individual activities if only under the label “private enterprise”.
Our decision is whether we want to pretend it's not going on, to retain the illusory but comforting pretense of personal privacy, or choose as a society to make sure that the average person can avail themselves of the same protections as the rich and powerful do.
posted by XMLicious at 11:18 PM on December 24, 2018
Lidar is based on near-visible-spectrum light and has similar properties to visible light; it can only see through forest canopy because a forest isn't a solid wall of foliage but more like layered screen doors. For a Lidar to see a gun "through" clothes, the gun would have to make a (probably human-visible) bulge.
posted by Pyry at 5:07 AM on December 25, 2018
posted by Pyry at 5:07 AM on December 25, 2018
I mean... wouldn't it be MORE suspicious if they paid cash? Every firearm I owned I bought with my credit card. Pretty much EVERYTHING I buy I buy with my credit card, except for the deli and diner I go to which are cash-only.
posted by Xiphias Gladius at 5:49 AM on December 25, 2018
posted by Xiphias Gladius at 5:49 AM on December 25, 2018
So, at what point should Visa have turned me in and what should the authorities have done?
When a victim complex kicked in and you started worrying that anyone who buys a gun ever would be caught up by a system designed to stop this purchase:
When a victim complex kicked in and you started worrying that anyone who buys a gun ever would be caught up by a system designed to stop this purchase:
two tear-gas grenades, a gas mask and filter, a .40-caliber Glock handgun, a 12-gauge shotgun, a .223-caliber AR-15, a 100-round drum magazine, two 40-round magazines, a laser sight, a bulletproof vest, 5,000 rounds of ammunition, two sets of handcuffs and “road stars” meant to slice through car tires.posted by the agents of KAOS at 5:58 AM on December 25, 2018 [6 favorites]
... two tear-gas grenades, a gas mask and filter, a .40-caliber Glock handgun, a 12-gauge shotgun, a .223-caliber AR-15, a 100-round drum magazine, two 40-round magazines, a laser sight, a bulletproof vest, 5,000 rounds of ammunition, two sets of handcuffs and “road stars” meant to slice through car tires.
posted by the agents of KAOS at 5:58 AM on December 25 [+] [!]
User ID checks out as Eponysterical. Carry on. :-)
posted by zaixfeep at 6:06 AM on December 25, 2018
posted by the agents of KAOS at 5:58 AM on December 25 [+] [!]
User ID checks out as Eponysterical. Carry on. :-)
posted by zaixfeep at 6:06 AM on December 25, 2018
If we want to try and push credit card companies not to allow firearms purchases on credit that's... fine, I guess
From my read of the article, this seemed to be the eventual goal, more so than just some kind of flagging system for sudden large purchases (which as noted is easily avoided by just spacing out the purchases slightly, using the "regular gun nut" pattern rather than the "incipient mass shooter" pattern). It's a really interesting article in identifying that there is a pattern of people financing their murder sprees on credit cards, and probably has the legal departments of every credit card company researching over the holidays to make sure they aren't going to end up with liability if there really is such a clear pattern.
But it isn't so clear that these purchases would stand out from the regular kind of debt-fueled shopping sprees, since plenty of people every day make the poor financial decision to use credit to buy firearms that they can't really afford. Under current law, it is completely legal to buy a bunch of guns at the same time, or order ammunition and "tactical" gear in bulk. Maybe that shouldn't be legal, but it is and with the current supreme court is likely to stay that way for the future, which is why people are looking at credit cards to see if that is a vulnerable point of pressure.
We need to do something about gun deaths in America and I have some ideas about how to address that but I tend to not engage in the discussion because there are usually some disparaging remarks right off the bat from fellow lefties that paint all gun owners with a big broad brush. It discourages conversation.
Pretty much this. Zingers are fun, and there's no requirement to be well informed before you comment in any kind of thread, but it's not a great pattern of discourse.
posted by Dip Flash at 8:19 AM on December 25, 2018
From my read of the article, this seemed to be the eventual goal, more so than just some kind of flagging system for sudden large purchases (which as noted is easily avoided by just spacing out the purchases slightly, using the "regular gun nut" pattern rather than the "incipient mass shooter" pattern). It's a really interesting article in identifying that there is a pattern of people financing their murder sprees on credit cards, and probably has the legal departments of every credit card company researching over the holidays to make sure they aren't going to end up with liability if there really is such a clear pattern.
But it isn't so clear that these purchases would stand out from the regular kind of debt-fueled shopping sprees, since plenty of people every day make the poor financial decision to use credit to buy firearms that they can't really afford. Under current law, it is completely legal to buy a bunch of guns at the same time, or order ammunition and "tactical" gear in bulk. Maybe that shouldn't be legal, but it is and with the current supreme court is likely to stay that way for the future, which is why people are looking at credit cards to see if that is a vulnerable point of pressure.
We need to do something about gun deaths in America and I have some ideas about how to address that but I tend to not engage in the discussion because there are usually some disparaging remarks right off the bat from fellow lefties that paint all gun owners with a big broad brush. It discourages conversation.
Pretty much this. Zingers are fun, and there's no requirement to be well informed before you comment in any kind of thread, but it's not a great pattern of discourse.
posted by Dip Flash at 8:19 AM on December 25, 2018
Before you do anything, you first have to get past the fact that it is forbidden by law for the government to keep records of any gun purchase longer than 24 hours. The NRA won't even let you get that far. See if you can get past that minimal hurdle before even thinking about tracking credit cards or licensing.
posted by JackFlash at 8:42 AM on December 25, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by JackFlash at 8:42 AM on December 25, 2018 [3 favorites]
The credit card company doesn't get a breakdown of what items are in a transaction; most gun stores' POS systems are pretty basic to boot. (I know of one that's still—in the last two years at least—using the chunk-chunk countertop carbon-paper thing, and refusing people who had cards without raised lettering. It was wild.)
Someone buying a boatload of inexpensive firearms isn't going to be distinguishable from the perspective of the card issuer from someone just buying one very expensive gun. They bank gets a total amount and a Merchant Category Code (MCC), which they can definitely use to profile customers based on their buying habits, but more by looking across multiple transactions (and apparently looking for stuff like used clothing stores and tire repair? wtf), not drilling down into the details of a particular transactions.
A frequently proposed idea is to require Know Your Customer-type rules for gun dealers similar to banks, but in large part that already exists: dealers record transactions on the ATF Form 4473 and have to get preauthorization via the FBI NICS system. This is analogous to (but predates, and probably partially inspired) the checks that happen when you now go to open a bank account in post-9/11 America, and have your SSN run against the OFAC terror list, FIDM child support shitlist, etc. So the infrastructure and process is already there. What's problematic is the quality of the backend data, largely because the Federal government has to arm-twist state agencies to populate it based on arrest records and other stuff. There is an ongoing "Fix NICS" campaign to improve NICS coverage, sponsored in part by the firearms industry. (N.B. the NSSF, not the NRA, is the firearms industry's lobbying group.) It's done pretty well in terms of legislation, which supports my theory that if you focus on areas where there is across-the-board agreement in principle, you can get gun-control legislation passed.
There're some legitimate questions, whenever you talk about blacklists that are in part based on mental health records, around exactly what type of mental-health records ought to go in as disqualifying, and how to balance the risk of someone buying a gun against the chilling effect that might have on people pursuing mental health treatment, and how people get themselves off the list if their conditions change... but those don't seem to be deal-breakers.
The next step in this area, IMO, is to open NICS up at zero cost to private-party intrastate transactions, where it can't currently be used. From there, states could require its use if they wanted to, and I suspect some immediately would. That would effectively close the so-called "gun show loophole" without actually prohibiting gun shows or any of the other parade of horribles that other proposed changes involve.
posted by Kadin2048 at 8:49 AM on December 25, 2018
Someone buying a boatload of inexpensive firearms isn't going to be distinguishable from the perspective of the card issuer from someone just buying one very expensive gun. They bank gets a total amount and a Merchant Category Code (MCC), which they can definitely use to profile customers based on their buying habits, but more by looking across multiple transactions (and apparently looking for stuff like used clothing stores and tire repair? wtf), not drilling down into the details of a particular transactions.
A frequently proposed idea is to require Know Your Customer-type rules for gun dealers similar to banks, but in large part that already exists: dealers record transactions on the ATF Form 4473 and have to get preauthorization via the FBI NICS system. This is analogous to (but predates, and probably partially inspired) the checks that happen when you now go to open a bank account in post-9/11 America, and have your SSN run against the OFAC terror list, FIDM child support shitlist, etc. So the infrastructure and process is already there. What's problematic is the quality of the backend data, largely because the Federal government has to arm-twist state agencies to populate it based on arrest records and other stuff. There is an ongoing "Fix NICS" campaign to improve NICS coverage, sponsored in part by the firearms industry. (N.B. the NSSF, not the NRA, is the firearms industry's lobbying group.) It's done pretty well in terms of legislation, which supports my theory that if you focus on areas where there is across-the-board agreement in principle, you can get gun-control legislation passed.
There're some legitimate questions, whenever you talk about blacklists that are in part based on mental health records, around exactly what type of mental-health records ought to go in as disqualifying, and how to balance the risk of someone buying a gun against the chilling effect that might have on people pursuing mental health treatment, and how people get themselves off the list if their conditions change... but those don't seem to be deal-breakers.
The next step in this area, IMO, is to open NICS up at zero cost to private-party intrastate transactions, where it can't currently be used. From there, states could require its use if they wanted to, and I suspect some immediately would. That would effectively close the so-called "gun show loophole" without actually prohibiting gun shows or any of the other parade of horribles that other proposed changes involve.
posted by Kadin2048 at 8:49 AM on December 25, 2018
My bank won't let me buy games from GOG. So, yeah this is a no-go for me.
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 8:59 AM on December 25, 2018
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 8:59 AM on December 25, 2018
ATF Form 4473 does not even require that you enter your social security number as an identifier. ATF Form 4473 does not have anywhere that indicates what type of gun or how many guns you are buying.
posted by JackFlash at 8:59 AM on December 25, 2018
posted by JackFlash at 8:59 AM on December 25, 2018
I honestly don't believe the problem is guns per se, or "gun culture" or the availability of credit to buy them. In the US, the problem is a culture of violence that historically and presently has manifested itself in many ways (frontier life, Western movies, glorification of wars, glorification in films and books of mobsters, violent acts that pervade our entertainment media in TV shows, movies, books, music, cops whose training and practice includes hairtrigger violent responses, the biggest military budget in the history of the world, etc. etc.)
With that culture in place, significantly restricting access to guns, or reducing the gun ownership rate, is not going to happen. But if that culture were to change, away from violence and toward tolerance, patience, respect, and compassion (particularly for people with mental health problems), then gun violence would decline in response, even if the gun ownership rate remained steady.
So the question really is, how to make that cultural change. Credit restrictions or monitoring would only serve to push more people into gun buying "before they taken them away from us."
posted by beagle at 9:11 AM on December 25, 2018 [1 favorite]
With that culture in place, significantly restricting access to guns, or reducing the gun ownership rate, is not going to happen. But if that culture were to change, away from violence and toward tolerance, patience, respect, and compassion (particularly for people with mental health problems), then gun violence would decline in response, even if the gun ownership rate remained steady.
So the question really is, how to make that cultural change. Credit restrictions or monitoring would only serve to push more people into gun buying "before they taken them away from us."
posted by beagle at 9:11 AM on December 25, 2018 [1 favorite]
What America has is absurdly casual access to firearms. And that has lead to an entitled and delusional gun culture.
There was an action that came between those two conditions, as intentional as the bad faith of tobacco companies. Our so called "gun culture" is a direct result of lobbying by manufacturers.
I own about ten guns. I'd surrender most of them..
One thing I keep thinking about is that gun suicides outnumber gun homicides, in recent years.
posted by the Real Dan at 9:16 AM on December 25, 2018
There was an action that came between those two conditions, as intentional as the bad faith of tobacco companies. Our so called "gun culture" is a direct result of lobbying by manufacturers.
I own about ten guns. I'd surrender most of them..
One thing I keep thinking about is that gun suicides outnumber gun homicides, in recent years.
posted by the Real Dan at 9:16 AM on December 25, 2018
JackFlash: you first have to get past the fact that it is forbidden by law for the government to keep records of any gun purchase longer than 24 hours
The prohibition is specific to maintaining a database of firearms transactions or anything else that would constitute a firearms registry — it's not a barrier to licensing owners. There are legitimate concerns about maintaining a firearms registry, mostly because the Federal government has basically zero credibility when it comes to keeping valuable information secret. (I mean, they let the entire OPM cleared personnel database get stolen, down to the last detail; that should have been the crown jewel to protect, at least as far as unclassified information goes. So, yeah, not a hypothetical.) It wouldn't be to anybody's benefit to have the master list of Fantastic Firearms and Where To Find Them show up on some darknet website.
The current firearms transaction recordkeeping system is effectively a low-tech, distributed database, optimized for a particular kind of retrieval where you traverse a tree beginning with the manufacturer's records, to the primary dealer's, and so on, if you want to trace a particular firearm. Dealers are required to keep records for 20 years (most do perpetually), and dealers who go out of business have to submit their books to the ATF. This system works pretty well in terms of decentralizing information but still allowing it to be accessed in a particular way (for tracing found firearms at crime scenes, mostly).
I don't think there is any legal prohibition on constructing a database of individuals eligible to purchase (which is basically, individuals not prohibited from purchasing). My reading of Heller is that the USSC isn't against the idea in theory, either.
In most cases of mass shootings the problem isn't that people didn't know "this person is Not Okay", it's that the information wasn't communicated to the gun dealers in such a way that it was actionable, and resulted in a no-sale. That's a person-level piece of information, not a firearm or transaction-level piece of information, so it doesn't require a firearms registry or master transaction list.
posted by Kadin2048 at 9:17 AM on December 25, 2018
The prohibition is specific to maintaining a database of firearms transactions or anything else that would constitute a firearms registry — it's not a barrier to licensing owners. There are legitimate concerns about maintaining a firearms registry, mostly because the Federal government has basically zero credibility when it comes to keeping valuable information secret. (I mean, they let the entire OPM cleared personnel database get stolen, down to the last detail; that should have been the crown jewel to protect, at least as far as unclassified information goes. So, yeah, not a hypothetical.) It wouldn't be to anybody's benefit to have the master list of Fantastic Firearms and Where To Find Them show up on some darknet website.
The current firearms transaction recordkeeping system is effectively a low-tech, distributed database, optimized for a particular kind of retrieval where you traverse a tree beginning with the manufacturer's records, to the primary dealer's, and so on, if you want to trace a particular firearm. Dealers are required to keep records for 20 years (most do perpetually), and dealers who go out of business have to submit their books to the ATF. This system works pretty well in terms of decentralizing information but still allowing it to be accessed in a particular way (for tracing found firearms at crime scenes, mostly).
I don't think there is any legal prohibition on constructing a database of individuals eligible to purchase (which is basically, individuals not prohibited from purchasing). My reading of Heller is that the USSC isn't against the idea in theory, either.
In most cases of mass shootings the problem isn't that people didn't know "this person is Not Okay", it's that the information wasn't communicated to the gun dealers in such a way that it was actionable, and resulted in a no-sale. That's a person-level piece of information, not a firearm or transaction-level piece of information, so it doesn't require a firearms registry or master transaction list.
posted by Kadin2048 at 9:17 AM on December 25, 2018
Hey JackFlash, you are fundamentally wrong about the 4473 and the process of tracing firearms used in crimes. You absolutely have to fill out make, model and serial number for every firearm on a 4473. It's on page 2. If law enforcement needs to trace a gun they contact the manufacturer, then the distributor, then the retail point of sale and get the 4473 from them. I'm not saying it is a great system but I have personally seen it work in less than 20 minutes when the interested law enforcement agency was motivated.
posted by nestor_makhno at 9:44 AM on December 25, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by nestor_makhno at 9:44 AM on December 25, 2018 [2 favorites]
All information on Form 4473 must be destroyed by the ATF/FBI within 24 hours. They can keep no record of who bought guns or what type guns they purchased or how many they purchased. It is disappeared. Gun dealers must keep records but there are 60,000 of them and no requirements for digitizing. Just millions of paper records spread out across the country at 60,000 dealers.
posted by JackFlash at 10:00 AM on December 25, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by JackFlash at 10:00 AM on December 25, 2018 [1 favorite]
All information on Form 4473 must be destroyed by the ATF/FBI within 24 hours
I'l wager this is not happening/
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 10:13 AM on December 25, 2018
I'l wager this is not happening/
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 10:13 AM on December 25, 2018
There are legitimate concerns about maintaining a firearms registry, mostly because the Federal government has basically zero credibility when it comes to keeping valuable information secret.
Keeping valuable information secret? You can go on line and look up license plates and vehicle identification numbers. People can find out exactly where you park your car. People can look up every piece of real estate property you own and its address and valuation. They can look up your criminal record, driving records, divorces -- but oh no, gun ownership is too far.
Gun owners just have nutty ideas about their guns. Their nutty ideas are killing thousands of people every year.
posted by JackFlash at 10:15 AM on December 25, 2018 [5 favorites]
Keeping valuable information secret? You can go on line and look up license plates and vehicle identification numbers. People can find out exactly where you park your car. People can look up every piece of real estate property you own and its address and valuation. They can look up your criminal record, driving records, divorces -- but oh no, gun ownership is too far.
Gun owners just have nutty ideas about their guns. Their nutty ideas are killing thousands of people every year.
posted by JackFlash at 10:15 AM on December 25, 2018 [5 favorites]
And form 4473 isn't needed if someone buys a firearm from a private seller.
Those are big gaps that are easy to close. The idea that anything is wrong with a central database of licensed owners and registered weapons is unnecessary paranoia. License, Registration, and INSURANCE, proving you are securely storing your firearms.
posted by mikelieman at 10:15 AM on December 25, 2018
Those are big gaps that are easy to close. The idea that anything is wrong with a central database of licensed owners and registered weapons is unnecessary paranoia. License, Registration, and INSURANCE, proving you are securely storing your firearms.
posted by mikelieman at 10:15 AM on December 25, 2018
JackFlash, you are correct but are also ignoring what I said. If popo needs to trace a gun they don't have to look through 60,000 different ffl bound books. They start at the manufacturer and work their way down.
posted by nestor_makhno at 10:58 AM on December 25, 2018
posted by nestor_makhno at 10:58 AM on December 25, 2018
There have been experiments at various state levels with firearms registries. They are a solution to a problem that we don't have, at least as far as mass shooting incidents go. The problem is people who shouldn't be buying guns, buying guns. Having a database of firearms post-sale doesn't fix that, and creates other problems. And you'd have to do it over the very strong opposition of a lot of people; whether you think they are wrong or not is irrelevant. It's a waste of time and political capital for no gain.
There are already ways to trace firearms found at crime scenes, as people have pointed out, and this system works without creating a central point of failure. No law enforcement agency, to my knowledge, is begging for a Federal registry, and even if you set aside that lack of demand, and the knock-down-drag-out political fight that would be required to implement it, and the fact that it would be at great risk of being shut down the first time it got hacked (which it would)... you'd be spending money that could be spent improving NICS or something else that would actually stop sales.
There's a significant amount of low-hanging fruit that's still on the proverbial tree, no need to go looking for ones to climb, particularly if the climb is going to involve dodging rocks and the fruit may be inedible anyway.
Also, there's nothing wrong with paper records and I wish people stopped treating everything that isn't digitized as though there's something wrong with it. The same thing comes up in the context of electronic voting. Decentralized and paper-based systems are some of the most robust and difficult-to-tamper-with architectures you can build; they shouldn't be thrown away without an extremely clear gain.
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:21 AM on December 25, 2018
There are already ways to trace firearms found at crime scenes, as people have pointed out, and this system works without creating a central point of failure. No law enforcement agency, to my knowledge, is begging for a Federal registry, and even if you set aside that lack of demand, and the knock-down-drag-out political fight that would be required to implement it, and the fact that it would be at great risk of being shut down the first time it got hacked (which it would)... you'd be spending money that could be spent improving NICS or something else that would actually stop sales.
There's a significant amount of low-hanging fruit that's still on the proverbial tree, no need to go looking for ones to climb, particularly if the climb is going to involve dodging rocks and the fruit may be inedible anyway.
Also, there's nothing wrong with paper records and I wish people stopped treating everything that isn't digitized as though there's something wrong with it. The same thing comes up in the context of electronic voting. Decentralized and paper-based systems are some of the most robust and difficult-to-tamper-with architectures you can build; they shouldn't be thrown away without an extremely clear gain.
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:21 AM on December 25, 2018
There are already ways to trace firearms found at crime scenes, as people have pointed out, and this system works without creating a central point of failure.
Creating a single point of failure? That is pure gun nut paranoia, and one of the primary reasons nothing can be done. These people don't think rationally. It is pure emotional conspiracy.
Firearms found at crime scenes? That's the point. Unless a firearm is found at the scene and a serial number taken from that firearm, there is no way of tracing the gun. If you have three suspects to a shooting but no gun found at the scene, there is no way of knowing if any of them own a gun. You could ask them, but if they lie about their gun ownership, there is no way of telling if they are lying.
And if you trace that one gun by its serial number, there is no way of knowing if that person has other guns, 20 guns or 50 guns. Because there is no connection between names and gun ownership. If you don't have a serial number, you have no connection to a person.
But even if you have a serial number, first you have to contact the manufacturer and they give you a wholesaler and the wholesaler gives you a retailer and then the retailer can go through their thousands of paper records to get a buyer. But if that buyer sold the gun to someone else, there is no record of that.
It is total insanity. No other country on the planet does things this way. The U.S. is unique in it gun fetishism.
posted by JackFlash at 1:02 PM on December 25, 2018 [3 favorites]
Creating a single point of failure? That is pure gun nut paranoia, and one of the primary reasons nothing can be done. These people don't think rationally. It is pure emotional conspiracy.
Firearms found at crime scenes? That's the point. Unless a firearm is found at the scene and a serial number taken from that firearm, there is no way of tracing the gun. If you have three suspects to a shooting but no gun found at the scene, there is no way of knowing if any of them own a gun. You could ask them, but if they lie about their gun ownership, there is no way of telling if they are lying.
And if you trace that one gun by its serial number, there is no way of knowing if that person has other guns, 20 guns or 50 guns. Because there is no connection between names and gun ownership. If you don't have a serial number, you have no connection to a person.
But even if you have a serial number, first you have to contact the manufacturer and they give you a wholesaler and the wholesaler gives you a retailer and then the retailer can go through their thousands of paper records to get a buyer. But if that buyer sold the gun to someone else, there is no record of that.
It is total insanity. No other country on the planet does things this way. The U.S. is unique in it gun fetishism.
posted by JackFlash at 1:02 PM on December 25, 2018 [3 favorites]
The real thing is shutting down the entire private sale thing. There should be NO-ONE who owns a firearm who isn't licensed. That's where the paper fails. The moment the person who bought it from the gun shop PRIVATELY sells it, the system fails to track that.
posted by mikelieman at 3:33 PM on December 25, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by mikelieman at 3:33 PM on December 25, 2018 [3 favorites]
pure emotional conspiracy
Describes a lot of the rhetoric in this thread.
posted by Hal Mumkin at 6:51 PM on December 25, 2018
Describes a lot of the rhetoric in this thread.
posted by Hal Mumkin at 6:51 PM on December 25, 2018
The real thing is shutting down the entire private sale thing.
The article is making an entirely different point about how recent mass shooters have used easily available credit to finance their pre-killing buying sprees. The private sales loophole is definitely a thing, and registration proposals are a thing, but those aren't what the article is talking about.
posted by Dip Flash at 7:04 PM on December 25, 2018
The article is making an entirely different point about how recent mass shooters have used easily available credit to finance their pre-killing buying sprees. The private sales loophole is definitely a thing, and registration proposals are a thing, but those aren't what the article is talking about.
posted by Dip Flash at 7:04 PM on December 25, 2018
The article is about requiring credit card companies to monitor and detect suspicious gun purchases. Which is a total joke since the FBI already gets a Form 4473 that provides them with even more detailed information of sales. Yet federal law requires them to delete every trace of that information within 24 hours. Shifting the blame to credit card companies is ridiculous.
The problem is the NRA and the strangle hold they have on sensible gun control.
posted by JackFlash at 7:34 PM on December 25, 2018 [1 favorite]
The problem is the NRA and the strangle hold they have on sensible gun control.
posted by JackFlash at 7:34 PM on December 25, 2018 [1 favorite]
Shifting the blame to credit card companies is ridiculous.
It's not about shifting the blame. As the article says, current laws prevent the government from doing this but don't prevent credit card companies from doing it. So, in order to bypass the insanity of gun laws in America, just use the options we already have.
posted by the agents of KAOS at 7:27 AM on December 26, 2018
It's not about shifting the blame. As the article says, current laws prevent the government from doing this but don't prevent credit card companies from doing it. So, in order to bypass the insanity of gun laws in America, just use the options we already have.
posted by the agents of KAOS at 7:27 AM on December 26, 2018
There's an ironic element here, where people who own these guns think of .22s as something like super-BB guns (with the awareness that they can do more damage, but still...'plinkers'), vs. those who are on the far side of the trigger, where .22s and 9mms are as effective as rifles and shotguns combined.
You're taking strange things from that article. The article says that 68% of center-fire rifle hits were fatal and 34% of .22 hits were fatal. In other words, getting shot with a center-fire rifle is a heckuva lot more fatal than getting shot with a .22.
posted by Jahaza at 8:16 AM on December 26, 2018
You're taking strange things from that article. The article says that 68% of center-fire rifle hits were fatal and 34% of .22 hits were fatal. In other words, getting shot with a center-fire rifle is a heckuva lot more fatal than getting shot with a .22.
posted by Jahaza at 8:16 AM on December 26, 2018
I'm going to let the discussion of gun registries go; it's not really germane to the article and I don't think it makes a lot of sense to get further into it here.
It looks like the Fix NICS Act of 2017, which isn't great but is certainly progress, passed and was signed back in March 2018 (slightly weird because Congress.gov shows its component House and Senate bills as still in progress, not sure why—maybe something about the consolidated appropriations process?) and I think will start to go into effect in 2019. (And if you're surprised that Congress actually did something useful this year, well, join the club.)
So I am not sure that it's correct to say we have to backdoor gun policy through the financial system. First, because it's not clear that would be effective (credit card companies don't have the item-level information to determine if someone is about to go on a mass shooting spree or is just buying a really expensive Christmas present; people who are going on a shooting spree can just go to the ATM first; credit cards have a financial incentive not to prohibit transactions); second, because NICS exists and provides a uniform way of blocking over-the-counter sales without relying on various banks' tea-leaf-reading. Pushing on that seems more productive than creating a new, parallel, questionably-effective system.
What would be an interesting exercise would be to go through various mass shootings and see what warning signs were out there, could theoretically have been used as a prohibiting factor in NICS without creating a lot of false-positives, and use that as the basis for the next iteration of "Fix NICS", perhaps to prioritize which categories of information need to be input most promptly to not trigger funding cuts. I'm going to bet, without doing any reading first, that domestic violence is at the top of the list of what should be prioritized.
And if the effect of fixing NICS is to create an incentive to go around the process via private-party sales, the next thing would be to open NICS up to non-dealers engaging in private-party sales in states where that is legal. (It's not clear to me that the Federal government can just prohibit private-party sales occurring entirely intrastate. This is something people tend to think can be just magicked into happening, but the courts could disagree; the expansive powers given to the Feds under the Commerce Clause aren't necessarily representative of what they'd get when they start regulating an enumerated Constitutional right post-Heller, so it's a bit of an open question. Nobody knows, but it'd be a fight.) Some sort of preauthorization system for private-party sales doesn't seem like it would be too controversial; it's another middle-ground area where I think you could get at least grudging agreement from everyone, or just avoid a fight. This would effectively close the so-called "gun show loophole" without prohibiting gun shows. Win-win, or closer than you're likely to get otherwise.
Anyway, it's worth bearing in mind that the NRA only has political power because a whole lot of people care about the underlying issues and are willing to vote and donate money and write letters and all the other usual stuff on that basis; if they were not, it wouldn't exist. There is a big dog wagging that particular tail; what politicians care about is getting bitten by the dog.
posted by Kadin2048 at 2:49 PM on December 26, 2018
It looks like the Fix NICS Act of 2017, which isn't great but is certainly progress, passed and was signed back in March 2018 (slightly weird because Congress.gov shows its component House and Senate bills as still in progress, not sure why—maybe something about the consolidated appropriations process?) and I think will start to go into effect in 2019. (And if you're surprised that Congress actually did something useful this year, well, join the club.)
So I am not sure that it's correct to say we have to backdoor gun policy through the financial system. First, because it's not clear that would be effective (credit card companies don't have the item-level information to determine if someone is about to go on a mass shooting spree or is just buying a really expensive Christmas present; people who are going on a shooting spree can just go to the ATM first; credit cards have a financial incentive not to prohibit transactions); second, because NICS exists and provides a uniform way of blocking over-the-counter sales without relying on various banks' tea-leaf-reading. Pushing on that seems more productive than creating a new, parallel, questionably-effective system.
What would be an interesting exercise would be to go through various mass shootings and see what warning signs were out there, could theoretically have been used as a prohibiting factor in NICS without creating a lot of false-positives, and use that as the basis for the next iteration of "Fix NICS", perhaps to prioritize which categories of information need to be input most promptly to not trigger funding cuts. I'm going to bet, without doing any reading first, that domestic violence is at the top of the list of what should be prioritized.
And if the effect of fixing NICS is to create an incentive to go around the process via private-party sales, the next thing would be to open NICS up to non-dealers engaging in private-party sales in states where that is legal. (It's not clear to me that the Federal government can just prohibit private-party sales occurring entirely intrastate. This is something people tend to think can be just magicked into happening, but the courts could disagree; the expansive powers given to the Feds under the Commerce Clause aren't necessarily representative of what they'd get when they start regulating an enumerated Constitutional right post-Heller, so it's a bit of an open question. Nobody knows, but it'd be a fight.) Some sort of preauthorization system for private-party sales doesn't seem like it would be too controversial; it's another middle-ground area where I think you could get at least grudging agreement from everyone, or just avoid a fight. This would effectively close the so-called "gun show loophole" without prohibiting gun shows. Win-win, or closer than you're likely to get otherwise.
Anyway, it's worth bearing in mind that the NRA only has political power because a whole lot of people care about the underlying issues and are willing to vote and donate money and write letters and all the other usual stuff on that basis; if they were not, it wouldn't exist. There is a big dog wagging that particular tail; what politicians care about is getting bitten by the dog.
posted by Kadin2048 at 2:49 PM on December 26, 2018
I know this is late to the discussion, but financial institutions can do this today Using existing law. It’s called a suspicious activity report, and the institution can file this with authorities notify them. Institutions do it all the time for things that are deemed “suspicious” by the software/person who processes the transaction. Since SARs are confidential, you cannot ever find out if one has been filed on you.
SARS themselves go directly to a database used by law enforcement to identify criminal activity and take appropriate action. Seems like this purchases like these fall completely within the ballpark of why the SAR process exists.
posted by herda05 at 12:58 PM on December 27, 2018
SARS themselves go directly to a database used by law enforcement to identify criminal activity and take appropriate action. Seems like this purchases like these fall completely within the ballpark of why the SAR process exists.
posted by herda05 at 12:58 PM on December 27, 2018
What I predict is bullets & scopes being suggested when you log into Amazon after buying guns offline with your Amazon credit cards.
posted by asra at 4:14 PM on December 27, 2018
posted by asra at 4:14 PM on December 27, 2018
I agree the SAR/STR process would be how you'd implement the author's proposal, but how would a bank/card-issuer know to file a report?
The article says that the Aurora, CO perpetrator used a brand-new card, so there's no previous history for the issuer to compare to. The Pulse nightclub perpetrator split purchases across half a dozen cards from different banks, some of which were new. In no case are they getting itemized data, just transactions. It looks like a harder problem than AML: money laundering generally occurs over time, giving you an extra dimension to analyze over.
Even if there was a common thread across mass shootings that we could detect by combining together enough transactional data in one place, it could still end up being useless if the false positive rate was too high. It'd be easy to construct a heuristic given the small dataset that's perfectly sensitive [TP/TP+FN] but inadequately specific [TN/TN+FP]. So you need indicators that also don't generate a ton of FPs that will bury the signal in noise and junk SAR/STRs. Or go the other direction and overfit to the limited data, to the point where they're not predictive.
posted by Kadin2048 at 10:58 AM on December 28, 2018
The article says that the Aurora, CO perpetrator used a brand-new card, so there's no previous history for the issuer to compare to. The Pulse nightclub perpetrator split purchases across half a dozen cards from different banks, some of which were new. In no case are they getting itemized data, just transactions. It looks like a harder problem than AML: money laundering generally occurs over time, giving you an extra dimension to analyze over.
Even if there was a common thread across mass shootings that we could detect by combining together enough transactional data in one place, it could still end up being useless if the false positive rate was too high. It'd be easy to construct a heuristic given the small dataset that's perfectly sensitive [TP/TP+FN] but inadequately specific [TN/TN+FP]. So you need indicators that also don't generate a ton of FPs that will bury the signal in noise and junk SAR/STRs. Or go the other direction and overfit to the limited data, to the point where they're not predictive.
posted by Kadin2048 at 10:58 AM on December 28, 2018
A fair number of mass shooters were already known to law enforcement through violent misdemeanors or restraining orders. The fatalist argument has been that there's no way to spot shooters in advance so we need cops with guns, teachers with guns, store managers with guns, and janitors with guns. Maybe the suspicious character with the restraining order, history of violent offenses, and social media threats should get a higher level scrutiny if he suddenly takes on thousands of dollars of new credit and blows it on sporting goods.
Maybe we should be looking a lot harder at the notion that the trajectory from men who batter women to active shooters can't be examined or derailed.
Maybe our justice system should treat violent misogyny, which sometimes does escalate to active shooter incidents, with the same degree of scrutiny that it's treated nonviolent drug offenses.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 12:05 PM on December 28, 2018 [2 favorites]
Maybe we should be looking a lot harder at the notion that the trajectory from men who batter women to active shooters can't be examined or derailed.
Maybe our justice system should treat violent misogyny, which sometimes does escalate to active shooter incidents, with the same degree of scrutiny that it's treated nonviolent drug offenses.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 12:05 PM on December 28, 2018 [2 favorites]
« Older a New Hebrew Bible to Rival the King James | It’s the Season for Ghost Stories... and Quizes! Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
or something
posted by entropicamericana at 12:21 PM on December 24, 2018 [7 favorites]