So, gun sales can only be kept on paper. Can't be in a computer database because of the NRA

[JoanofArgh]

Link to tweet

?s=20&t=zhLY3Ud9eS2Lqb_rWk_gFw




“People don't think,” Charlie tells me. He's a trim guy, 51, full lips and a thin goatee, and he likes to wear three-piece suits. They fit loose, so the overall effect is awkward innocence, like an eighth grader headed to his first formal. “ I get e-mails even from police saying, ‘Can you type in the serial number and tell me who the gun is registered to?’ Every week. They think it's like a VIN number on a car. Even police. Police from everywhere. ‘Hey, can you guys hurry up and type that number in?’ ”It's a shoestring budget. It's a bunch of friggin' boxes. All half-ass records.”

So here's a news flash, from Charlie: “We ain't got a registration system. Ain't nobody registering no damn guns.” There is no national database of guns. We have no centralized record of who owns all the firearms we so vigorously debate, no hard data regarding how many people own them, how many of them are bought or sold, or how many even exist.

Anytime a cop in any jurisdiction in America wants to connect a gun to its owner, the request for help ends up here, at the National Tracing Center, in a low, flat, boring building that belies its past as an IRS facility, just off state highway 9 in Martinsburg, West Virginia, in the eastern panhandle of the state, a town of some 17,000 people, a Walmart, a JCPenney, and various dollar stores sucking the life out of a quaint redbrick downtown. On any given day, agents here are running about 1,500 traces; they do about 370,000 a year.

That's been a federal law, thanks to the NRA, since 1986: No searchable database of America's gun owners. So people here have to use paper, sort through enormous stacks of forms and record books that gun stores are required to keep and to eventually turn over to the feds when requested. It's kind of like a library in the old days—but without the card catalog. They can use pictures of paper, like microfilm (they recently got the go-ahead to convert the microfilm to PDFs), as long as the pictures of paper are not searchable. You have to flip through and read. No searching by gun owner. No searching by name.

https://www.gq.com/story/inside-federal-bureau-of-way-too-many-guns




This is insane!

[Walleye]

1. So insane. Isn't there a national database for DNA.

I’m sure they will have a robust national database for miscarriages

[Claustrum]

2. Can we do the same with abortion?

You can only record it on paper with laws prohibiting computer searchable databases.

[JoanofArgh]

8. Great idea!

[durablend]

17. Why not?

No computers in the Constitution!

[spanone]

3. K&R

[ProudMNDemocrat]

4. The guns pictured are not designed to hunt Bambi or Bullwinkle.

These are killing machines designed to cut down as many human beings in the shortest amount of time. Why in God's name would anyone want such things?

To compensate for small penis size? To boost a fragile ego? Yet, people are complaining about inflation! Give me a fucking break! Those guns cost in terms MORE than mucho tanks of gas for their SUVs and pickup trucks. Sad that they have not figured that out.

[brer cat]

6. +1

As the OP says, it is insane that we can't track these killing machines.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

9. Perhaps they're seized guns or military surplus

And not for sale?

[ProudMNDemocrat]

11. Still, why would anyone need an AR-15 or its ilk?

After closer review, I may have jumped the shark here.

These do look like weapons used in former wars. My bad.

[Hugin]

5. WV? You have got to be kidding me. n/t

[lostnfound]

10. I don't think it's just West Virginia.

[Hugin]

12. The national paper heap is kept in WV.

"... at the National Tracing Center, in a low, flat, boring building that belies its past as an IRS facility, just off state highway 9 in Martinsburg, West Virginia"

According to the article.

[BumRushDaShow]

15. Guaranteed that was a Robert C. Byrd special!

Scanning through some old appropriations bills, he was funding that sucker continually.

[herding cats]

7. It's true. The only databases is for guns reported stolen.

Beyond that the guns purchased with a background check are on paper and the private sales are lost to the wind.

[Lonestarblue]

13. Just one insane result of our laws on lobbying.

Money is not free speech. Outlawing donations to any political party to influence legislation would be an excellent start to addressing many of the issues. Of course I know it will never happen and the SC would shoot it down if it did. A few days ago, I read that protesting outside a SC justice’s home was a violation of law and not considered free speech or the right to protest. How have we turned things around so much that corporations and organizations like the NRA that promote death have more rights than people? We are so screwed up as a country that we may not turn this ship around until it is too late to save our nearly 250 year old democracy.

[thatdemguy]

14. Its not really no computers at all.

The sales records from maker to gun store are computerized. In some states, like Maryland, anything that is regulated aka handguns and assault rifles is 100% computerized. The states that dont have it, they call the gun store and the gun store goes thru their bound book. The bound book will have the buyers names and the date of the transfer, they then use that info to find the paperwork.

The records have to be maintained for over 20 years, and if the store goes out of business their books and records go to the ATF and are kept for ever.

From what I have read in Maryland its takes seconds, and the normal time for paperwork traces is under an hour ( if during normal hours )

Now in Maryland we have universal back ground checks, but who knows how well the law is being followed.

[JoanofArgh]

21. The article's referring to a NATIONAL database . Like the NCIC , for example.

Individual (most likely blue states) probably computerize but I bet not one red or even purple state has. It's harder to buy guns in blue states as well so a lot of people purchase them out of state and the sale doesn't turn up on any computer. Criminals take advantage of this.

Lori Lightfoot, Mayor of Chicago complains all the time about people just going over the border to Indiana ,where gun laws are lax, to purchase their killing implements.

[KS Toronado]

16. Repugs don't want paper mail-in ballots

voting machines only, but dealing with guns it's the opposite? Wish they'd
make up their minds which system is more efficient.

[dalton99a]

18. The best database ever:

[JoanofArgh]

23. In 1975! Lol

[Hugin]

27. Relax. We've got our best people on it...

Best people!

^ insert indiana jones eye roll ^

[calimary]

19. Well, we need that database. At least now it's a LOT more clear why.

I’d say about 19 times more clear.

Hey, death-gunners of America, I thought you were PROUD of your “right” to bear arms, and even shove that “right” in our faces while that precious “right” just blew 19 of our precious children away forever. Repeat: FOREVER.

So IF you ARE indeed so damn proud of that “right,” why are you keeping it so private? Why are you keeping it concealed? Why aren’t you out ‘n’ proud of it and showing it off to all of us, and showing us what you’ve got? And shoving it in our faces every damn day? Where are the gun parades? Where are the gun honeymoons? Hey, start ‘em out early! How ‘bout “a gun in every cradle”?

Sometimes I fantasize about evacuating to Canada - or someplace else where guns aren’t part of the everyday equation like they are, here in America. All I know for sure anymore is how badly I want them GONE.

[Orrex]

20. All guns should be registered in a publicly accessible database

And before any gun-fetishists piss and moan about privacy, I say fuck that red herring and fuck it hard.

I hold several state licenses all of which are easily viewed by the public and none of which has the power to under 19 children in a matter of seconds.

[niyad]

22. The same peoplevwho will be tracking women via apps, etc.

[sop]

24. By law, in many states gun sales records are required to be destroyed after a few days.

In Florida it's 48 hours after the background check is approved. The NRA opposes maintaining a "gun registry" so the government will not be able to confiscate firearms.

[pandr32]

25. I didn't know this and it will make me crazy going forward.

How did guns and the obviously wrong reinterpretation of the 2nd amendment intention become sacrosanct?

I would love to read an investigative piece that peeled away the layers of who and what money is behind this going back to the root. After all, the 2nd amendment wasn't interpreted to give every person a gun for over a hundred years. To have a records system as described in the article for something so dangerous to public safety is an insane anomaly. There are monsters behind this.

[sop]

28. A lot of people would like to investigate all the money Russia gave to the NRA, what they did

with it and who they bribed

[JoanofArgh]

29. Was wondering the same thing & saw this author recommend his book The Second Amendment: A Biography

on Twitter in a discussion about the 2nd. i think I'm going to buy it. From the book's page:

Widely acclaimed at the time of its publication, the life story of the most controversial, volatile, misunderstood provision of the Bill of Rights.

At a time of increasing gun violence in America, Waldman’s book provoked a wide range of discussion. This book looks at history to provide some surprising, illuminating answers.

The Amendment was written to calm public fear that the new national government would crush the state militias made up of all (white) adult men—who were required to own a gun to serve. Waldman recounts the raucous public debate that has surrounded the amendment from its inception to the present. As the country spread to the Western frontier, violence spread too. But through it all, gun control was abundant. In the twentieth century, with Prohibition and gangsterism, the first federal control laws were passed. In all four separate times the Supreme Court ruled against a constitutional right to own a gun.

The present debate picked up in the 1970s—part of a backlash to the liberal 1960s and a resurgence of libertarianism. A newly radicalized NRA entered the campaign to oppose gun control and elevate the status of an obscure constitutional provision. In 2008, in a case that reached the Court after a focused drive by conservative lawyers, the US Supreme Court ruled for the first time that the Constitution protects an individual right to gun ownership. Famous for his theory of “originalism,” Justice Antonin Scalia twisted it in this instance to base his argument on contemporary conditions.

https://www.amazon.com/Second-Amendment-Biography-Michael-Waldman-ebook/dp/B00GKKTYAG/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2KLH56JL1ZL5Z&keywords=2nd+amendment&qid=1653498696&s=digital-text&sprefix=2nd+amendment%2Cdigital-text%2C118&sr=1-1

In The Second Amendment: A Biography, Michael Waldman shows that our view of the amendment is set, at each stage, not by a pristine constitutional text, but by the push and pull, the rough and tumble of political advocacy and public agitation.

[pandr32]

31. Excellent recommendation!

[ohmeohmy]

26. this is pure insanity

I had no idea about this. I hardly slept last night, shaking with rage and thinking about my daughter who teaches first and second graders, and how she will handle questions from children when there are no answers that make any sense at all.

[gldstwmn]

30. We need to look at and revamp how people obtain weapons specifically from FFL dealers.

That business should be prohibitively expensive to be in and once someone sells a weapon that is used to kill someone in the commission of a crime they should be shut down. Then they can petition to be reinstated once they prove that they did their due diligence in the sale.
Also it's clear the red flag law needs some help. The people that are supposed to be petitioning a judge for the red flag aren't doing it.
And yes, we need a computerized database.

[Midnight Writer]

32. Thank you. I posted this info here a while back and got a response calling me a liar.

Happy to have some back-up. It's kind of been sticking in my craw.