10-03-2019, 12:42 PM
(10-03-2019, 10:33 AM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: For someone engaging in it as a source of criminal revenue it's rather easy. Does X person buy a large amount of guns? Does X person still have possession of a majority of them? Do guns purchased by X person seem to often end up in the hands of criminals? Now if you have a person who has done this once or twice proving straw purchasing becomes more difficult, but not impossible. However, finding a large number of people willing to risk prison time to furnish criminals with guns is not an easy task, hence the numbers of people engaged in this activity are small and account for a large percentage of straw purchases.
The main issue is that the building a case takes a large commitment of time and investigative effort. Add that to straw purchasing not being a "sexy" arrest, indictment or conviction coupled with the always present potential of the jury buying the defense's bullshit and it's not made a priority.
Yes, this is a problem, but a proportionately minute one. The straw purchases I explain above aside, it's exceedingly rare for a criminal to purchase a firearm from a law abiding individual via private party transfer (CA lingo there). Rare enough to be statistically insignificant.
Sure, it would block the insignificant number of guns going to criminals in that fashion. However, seeing as how the vast majority of firearms end up in criminal hand via theft, both home and commercial burglary, followed distantly by straw purchases, it would have almost zero effect on gun related homicides. In fact, I'd venture to say it would have zero impact as criminals would then turn exclusively to the methods just mentioned.
Also, said universal background checks would require a national database of owned firearms to be enacted. Such a database could then be used in the future by Dems like Robert Francis, Biden and Warren who are openly campaigning, to varying degrees, on the confiscation of legally purchased private property. Those public, and finally honest, statements from leading candidates for POTUS (and Robert Francis) have utterly squashed any chance of universal background checks being agreed upon. It's almost like they don't really care about gun violence.
It could, but as I stated above not to any appreciable degree.
What you described is how and why straw purchases are used to take advantage of the current system. It’s why I 95 is called the iron pipeline. It’s why guns are purchased legally in states such as GA, FL, or SC then sold illegally in states such as NY. NYPD statistics show the vast majority of guns confiscated at crime scenes are from out of state. Not sure how we could call that statistically insignificant. Current laws don’t prevent this type of activity. Universal background checks and a database of ownership would go a long way toward eliminating straw purchases. The vast majority of citizens don’t support confiscation or weapons bans, but do support better background checks so I don’t buy the NRA level paranoia associated with databases or universal background checks.
