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Gentlemen start your anecdote engines!!!
Good job.
Don't worry about the Gun Shows, folks. Worry about the Automobile Trunk Shows.
Look, I'm all for closing loopholes, immediate background checks, a national database for gun owners and criminal files, etc. Lots of gun owners are. But you're not going to stop bad people from doing bad things, any more than you can stop them mixing fertilizer and diesel fuel.
You don't have the right to ban me from using guns. Sorry, but you don't. You can froth at the mouth over it if you like, just as I do for all the incredibly bad drivers who still get licenses, but it won't do you any good. If you could lay off the rhetoric, maybe try to have a reasonable discussion, come up with a feasible plan you might get somewhere. But that doesn't have the nice, refreshing taste of self-righteousness, does it?
30,000 gun deaths per year, 12,000 of them murders. 50,000,000 registered gun owners. Over 200,000,000 legally owned weapons in the country. Meaning that by even the most generous estimate 0.025% of legal gun owners are involved in a homicide, using 0.006% of those legally owned weapons. And you know as well as I do a significant portion of that gun violence is committed by people who are not legal gun owners. And yet it's the few outliers you focus on, because the truth of the matter is you don't have the slightest idea what to do with all the illegal guns in this country, and legal gun owners make a convenient target for your indignant wrath. Because you like to think of gun owners as ignorant rednecks and violence-obsessed yokels. In other words, you're just as full of it as every bigot equating blackness with criminality, every prude equating sex with sin, every politician equating drug use with drug dealing.
You still don't care of course, Goldy, because what could gun owners possibly know? They're not you. They've got loud, obnoxious, scary people different than you on their side, and you can't stand that. For the record, I don't like a lot of fun owners either. I think every moron who strokes his gun and clasps it to him and thinks the 2nd Amendment is the end all argument needs to get laid a lot more. A lot of gun owners ARE ignorant rednecks. A lot of us aren't, though. But we're all the same to you, aren't we?
It doesn't really matter, though, because as I said you have no plan, no feasible idea what to do about the problem of gun violence. Trying to get rid of legal gun ownership is destined to fail. Illegal guns will continue to pour through the borders or be stolen from legal gun owners. And people will continue to die. That's okay, though. Every time one does, you get to feel justified in your close-mindedness again. And really, isn't that better than actually trying to do something about it? It sure is.
So the bulk of your comment is just blah, blah, blah.
While we're at it, let's also make it illegal to shoot people with guns. That would put an end to that too.
I have no idea how the law works in that regard, but if that WERE the case, closing the loophole would stop a lot of these sales.
Legislators aren't necessarily gutless. In my mind, they're a damn sight smarter than you are, because unlike you, they are required to look at what effective enforcement actually would involve, and how much it would cost, and where that money would have to come from, and how much (please excuse the metaphor) bang for their buck they'd be getting.
The answers, in order, are too much, too much, and not enough. When you actually sit down and THINK about this, the reasons for legislative inaction become clear, except to the blind.
Now, maybe he would have found some gang member who sells guns illegally but most people don't know illegal arms dealers. Maybe he would have broken into a home and stolen a gun but most homes don't have guns in them and those that do are fairly risky to rob. So, why wouldn't we close a loophole (whatever you want to call that loophole) that makes it easy for someone like this to buy a gun?
BTW, I know you gun nuts just love dragging out the "fertilizer bomb" example but if you remember after the Oklahoma City bombing we passed a number of national laws tracking those fertilizer purchases and making it more difficult for criminals to get their hands on it. Since then how many buildings have been blown up with fertilizer bombs?
Nobody here has suggested banning you from using guns. Even most of those who would like to eliminate all guns know that's not realistic. What we're talking about are some relatively minor changes to gun laws that will not stop legal users from getting them but will make it more difficult for criminals to get them.
The same way we enforce a variety of laws. How do they enforce drug laws? Send out cops to buy illegally and catch them, arrest people who have purchased illegally and track to the source, intelligence gathering to find out who's selling. There are a ton of ways that they've already developed for enforcing other laws that could be applied to this one. It won't catch everyone but it will catch enough to make people think twice before breaking the law.