5 ms·

If you are an arms dealer of some sort you have to do checks. You do not if you are doing personal sales.

• krapp 11y ago
  fair enough.
• Pxtl 11y ago
  And this is why Americans look crazy to much of the rest of the world. I understand owning guns. I don't understand taking libertarian ideals go the length of owning untraceable guns that can be sold to a random person with no oversight.
  • icebraining 11y ago
    I don't think it's hard to understand. The lore is that guns are an essential component in the protection against governmental overreach, therefore allowing strict governmental oversight over individual gun ownership would defeat the purpose. I happen to disagree that owning an handgun (or even a semi-automatic rifle) will actually be very influential in the event of a dictatorial takeover, but I can understand the logic.
    • brandonmenc 11y ago
      > I happen to disagree that owning an handgun (or even a semi-automatic rifle) will actually be very influential in the event of a dictatorial takeover It can't hurt.
      • icebraining 11y ago
        Sure it can, if part of the population actually supports the dictatorship, it becomes even more dangerous for the persecuted minority. We've seen examples of this many times.
    • MCRed 11y ago
      During WWII we produced guns en masse called "the liberator" which were air dropped behind Nazi lines. The Nazis ran out of ammo and so many of the jews in the concentration camps were guarded by empty rifles. If they had had basic firearms knowledge they would have known this, as the Nazis weren't even putting the magazines in the rifles. They could have over thrown their captors relatively easily, even being unarmed, because they outnumbered them many to one, and their captors were unarmed. So not even having guns there, a gun culture would have likely saved lives. (this is based on an account of an elderly man who was in the concentration camps and later came to learn about guns as part of his vow of "never again". There is an organization based on this principle called "Jews for the preservation of firearms ownership.")
  • kec 11y ago
    The problem is there doesn't seem to be a way for the left and right to compromise on this issue. You can't realistically police private party transfers without mandatory registration, and there are too many instances of registration later leading to confiscation for that to be palatable to 2nd Amendment rights advocates. On the other side, there have been several attempts to open up access to the national background check system to private sellers, but every time it gets blocked by the left, as voluntary background checks are largely seen as an ineffective half measure.
  • seivan 11y ago
    No, you look crazy because all those Michael Moore shit peddled and force fed to us when we were young in school. I found yesterday that full automatic assault rifles are not legal in the US but that's the first shit any idiot brings up here when they want to paint Americans as "crazy". Don't get more wrong, as things progress in Europe, we're eventually going to need those "crazy" American weapons.
    • alistairSH 11y ago
      Except, fully automatic guns are legal. You need a special license to own them, and they get registered, but they are legal. They just aren't as easy to buy and own as semi-automatic weapons.
    • Wingman4l7 11y ago
      Technically, you can get a fully automatic rifle in the US -- but it's very expensive and requires a special permit. It would have had to have been in circulation prior to the 1986 ban; there is a very limited pool of them in collector's hands and they go for 5 figures.
    • refurb 11y ago
      full automatic assault rifles are not legal in the US That's incorrect, they are legal federally, but some states have made them illegal. In order to purchase an automatic weapon, you need to submit a form to the FBI, provide fingerprints, have your local police chief sign-off (or create an LLC) and pay a $200 tax. It's a very thorough background check. Not many people buy them since the cheapest weapons cost $10,000 and go up to $50,000. This is due to the limited supply since civilians can only buy automatic weapons that were built before 1986.
      • gravypod 11y ago
        You can also technically become, for the same price, a Class-3 FFL with a SOT. It is about $500-$1000 USD per year. You need a secure place to hold your arms, keep extremely well maintained records of anything you buy, and if you stop paying your SOT any post-86 things you have manufactured must be destroyed. If think you might also have to file a form 1 for everything you manufacture and that takes 1-5 months even stretching out to a year in some cases. This also comes with a round of your prints being sent to the FBI, ATF, and I'm assuming a bunch of other three letter acronyms that you don't ever want to meet. But, if you can do that, get a drill press, and make friends at your local PD you can make some good money on the side by building post-86 dealer samples and handling transfers for your local PD. Believe it or not, but by my current understanding factories cannot ship guns directly to police offices, they must still be handled through an FFL.
  • alistairSH 11y ago
    I don't understand the down votes you are receiving... your comment is one I have heard from relatives and friends from Europe. As noted in the other response, the historical reason is that private gun-ownership (usually in relation to a local militia of some sort) is the only protection against a tyrannical government. In the era of the Revolutionary War, that was certainly true. I don't happen to believe that is true any more, and that the 2nd amendment is an anachronism. But, I'm in a minority (where the majority in the US seems to prefer limited gun ownership - more so than what we have now, but not complete bans and confiscations, as Australia saw recently).