So as part of their “common sense reforms,” the administration will magically endow itself with the authority to magically endow the DOJ with the authority to make somebody’s buddies richer by decreeing that only ID-locked guns may be sold. Despite that this old idea has never been made to work reliably and (of course) police, military and VIP security will most certainly remain exempt.
And this particular boondoggle will only cost 2 mill of the $382.1 million Holder wants to spend on “gun safety” in fiscal ’15. I am not making this up. According to the article, that’s not even a subset of the more than a billion Obama wants to spend to “protect Americans from gun violence—including $182 million to support the president’s ‘Now is the Time’ gun safety initiative.”
This has got to be nothing more than crony capitalism; they can’t really believe any of this bullshit could actually move the situation in any direction but underground. Have these people never heard of a black market? I’m reasonably sure that if they force the kind of violence here that they’ve created in Central America with their drug war, we’ll be more competent at it than some cartel of stoned Mexicans.
(No offense meant to our southern neighbors, but Jesus. Learn to shoot. Or join the NYPD or LAPD where you’re apparently supposed to blaze away indiscriminately. Or the IMPD where you get to do it stoned.)
On the surface at least, ID-locked guns aren’t a completely horrible idea in some circumstances. In a household with a lot of little kids you really shouldn’t leave your handguns lying around the way I do, but burying them in a vault isn’t an attractive option either. If it were: A: proven completely reliable, and B: operated in some very uncomplicated way that wouldn’t fail me in the shit, and C: absolutely, positively could not be defeated by the ‘proper authorities’ (ha), and D: didn’t double the cost of the gun, and E: wasn’t mandated by Eric “Sleazeball” Holder, well then … I still wouldn’t buy one because it doesn’t address any problem I have. But it might interest people like my daughter, who has a little kid.
Or it might not. And where is the sane universe where the government doesn’t get to arrogate to itself the power to make those decisions? Because I want to move there.
“Despite that this old idea has never been made to work reliably…”
Which is totally irrelevant because nobody has any legitimate authority to impose this (or anything else) on anyone no matter how “reliably” it works or how good it might seem to some.
It could most certainly be an option for those who wish to have it… and pay for it.
(too many links – I know this one is going to moderation)
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Can they believe this would “work” [for some totalitarian values of “work]? Yes; they aren’t stupid (some of them, Sebelius excepted) but they are crazy. Please recall that their boss is the guy who forgets that he’s married, forgets his offsprings’ ages, forgets his offsprings’ gender, forgts… anyway, yoy get the idea. There’s a reason they rarely let out without a keeper and teleprompter.
The black market is an excellent point. As usual, they’re forgetting that America has a long and honored history of smuggling. Rumrunners, gunrunners (as opposed to authorized gunwalkers), <wool,/b> for crying out loud. In New England is virtually a sport now. Speaking of sports, anyone recall the moonshining origins of stock car racing?
Sheesh, we smuggle treats into movie theaters just for the hell of it.
Or we could just build what we want. How many CNC mills are in the wild now? Add in 3D printing (not for direct printing of guns, but for cheaply and accurately making mold forms for cast items), and good old fashioned zip guns and other cell block (funny how they can’t even keep weapons out of “totally controlled” prisons) treasures of ingenuity, and I think we’ll just continue prove that an all-out “War on Reliable Guns will prove as effective (and lucrative) as the War on Some Drugs.
The black market is conservatively (much too conservatively, I think) estimated to be 10% of the US economy. Considering that California’s leading cash crop has been, for years, marijuana (beating out the number two crop by more $1.2Billion per year), I think we should take that with a large grain of salt.
Why doesn’t the government start with making these modifications to FEDERAL OWNED firearms their 1st priority ? They have them in stock and easily accessible. They could easily begin this program with their guns and make sure when they are stolen from their custody (which happens more frequently then they like to admit), they can be traced down. The budget – why I guess ATF and others would be glad to pay for these modifications out of their own pocket – I mean, its for safety!
Yeah . . . thats it . . . take a memo . . .
Well, anonymous to answer you rhetorical question [grin]… you might even recall that personalized weapons — smart guns — were originally proposed in the real world for cops, to protect them from being shot with their own lost weapons. Funny how once they realized just how unreliable (think of the possibilities for fail safe for a designed meant to stop the gun working in the first place) cops refuse to adopt it and suddenly the tech became “for the children”.
But it does occur to me that this might be their cunning plan to jumpstart the economy and create new jobs… in the black market. Ghu only knows how they’ll tax ’em and make the employers go with Obamacare.
Since Brazil is awash with sub machine guns, reliable ones too, made in tin shack factories using little more than a pillar drill do they really think they will solve anything. It’s a bunch of metal parts easily replicated sticking gizmos on legally built ones will do nothing other than increase the price.
If the black market for guns turns out anything like the black market for prohibited drugs bhas, then the big fish are likely to be the state blessed ones.
oh yeah, that’s already happened hasn’t it.
The most heavily controlled, weapon-prohibited, closely-watched-by-government areas in our nation, are also the most violent areas in our nation. They’re called prisons.
Draw the moral.
If you find that send back word. I’ve been looking for it for 20yrs and haven’t found it yet.