So it turns out that pro-gun proponents don't really support background checks after all

[rrneck]

86. "What you are really saying is that the lives that could be saved aren't worth the bother."

Actually, that's what you're saying. Remember the merry go round in post #54? People use guns to defend themselves. It happens. It's been happening since guns were invented, and it will continue to happen. Sometimes they are used to kill the assailant. Sometimes simply brandishing them works. Most frequently I expect, guns keep people from doing bad things because of the possibility of their use. How many? We don't know because we can't attach a number to things people decided not to do because of what they thought might happen. Awareness of the humanity of others through a theory of mind is a large part of what makes us human. Disregarding that ability in others is inhumane. Public policy that fails to take that into account results in horrible injustice because you have to dehumanize people to brutalize them.

Thus, when we cite the statistics of death by firearm without taking into consideration the surrounding circumstances of the reality of people's lives that cannot be plugged into a spreadsheet and base public policy on that attitude, we get public policy that turns it's failures into collateral damage of that policy. Public policy that fails to take into account the humanity of the people it is designed to serve lies at the heart of the most horrible injustices in human history. And those injustices almost always begin by good meaning people who refuse to admit to the realities of peoples lives in favor of defending ideology. Note that you have yet to acknowledge that people use guns to defend themselves. In fact, you explicitly denied the possibility.

If you want the seller to maintain the records, here's what you get. A gun can last a hundred years, or significantly longer than most people live. That means that records of a sale have to be kept for the rest of your life. How many people are actually able or willing to do that? Plus, the infrastructure to regulate people mandated to keep records like that already exists, and would no doubt have to be expanded to include private citizens. That's the infrastructure that governs gun dealers. So requiring private citizens to keep the records creates a potential eighty million gun dealers, and all the problems associated with regulating them. If you think straw purchases are hard to catch now, just wait until you expand the number of gun dealers by a factor of ten or twenty. Plus, the ATF has the right to walk into any gun dealers place of business and demand to examine his records. Mandate record keeping for private citizens and you just granted the government the right to conduct surprise inspections inside people's homes. That is a civil rights and political turd in a punchbowl.