JoeKing
Diehard
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Thank you for spitballing all these ideas. No offense intended but you sound like you have no experience with firearms. I can fire 30 rounds with a 30 round magazine about three seconds faster than I can fire 30 rounds from three 10 round magazines. And if I want to fire a hundred rounds, whether I do it from a hundred round magazine or ten 10 round magazine, I can do it within a 10 second difference. So the magazine capacity argument you are making doesn't really matter. Making ammo more expensive for the sake of making it less attainable is about the most facetious idea I've heard in a long time. Would you recommend saving lives from car accidents by making fuel unaffordable? Background checks are a good thing but they already exist. The problem with background checks is they are only as good as the people doing them. As for a national database, this has already been tried. It was called the National Firearms(NFA) act of 1934. As the legislative history of the law discloses, its underlying purpose was to curtail, if not prohibit, transactions in NFA firearms. Congress found these firearms to pose a significant crime problem because of their frequent use in crime, particularly the gangland crimes of that era such as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. The $200 making and transfer taxes on most NFA firearms were considered quite severe and adequate to carry out Congress’ purpose to discourage or eliminate transactions in these firearms. The $200 tax has not changed since 1934.
As structured in 1934, the NFA imposed a duty on persons transferring NFA firearms, as well as mere possessors of unregistered firearms, to register them with the Secretary of the Treasury. If the possessor of an unregistered firearm applied to register the firearm as required by the NFA, the Treasury Department could supply information to State authorities about the registrant’s possession of the firearm. State authorities could then use the information to prosecute the person whose possession violated State laws. For these reasons, the Supreme Court in 1968 held in the Haynes case that a person prosecuted for possessing an unregistered NFA firearm had a valid defense to the prosecution — the registration requirement imposed on the possessor of an unregistered firearm violated the possessor’s privilege from self-incrimination under the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The Haynes decision made the 1934 Act virtually unenforceable.
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