The semantics of gun control...

[Lee-Lee]

14. And another reason is people crafting the proposed laws are clueless about what they try to regulate

Take background checks- on its own the idea in general sounds good, and just presented as "expanded background checks" it sounds great and people say they like it.

But then you write it into a bill that is badly crafted and would make things people don't see as a problem into felonies and it doesn't get passed- because the people wiring the bill don't really know about guns or what they are trying to regulate.

That was the pitfall of Toomey-Manchin. One big example is the issue of loaning a gun to a hunting buddy. Most people would say if the person already owns guns and just wants to borrow a certain kind of shotgun to go hunting that should require a trip to a licensed dealer, paperwork and a fee to loan it and then another trip to a dealer, paperwork and a few to return it.

So they supposedly put an exception in the law for temporary loan of a gun for pis purposes of hunting. The problem is the people writing the law don't know anything about hunting, so they wrote it saying that the gun could only be possessed by the borrower in places and at times where hunting is legal. They probably thought that they were saying in hunting season in states where is legal, but that's not how the wrote the law. Most hunting is legal only in daylight hours and you cannot hunt in city limits or from a road or within a certain distance of a road- so quite literally the only way the hunting loan exemption would work would be if the person loaning the gun woke up early the day of the hunt, drove to the hunting location and carried the firearm a legal distance from the road and handed it off- and got it back the same way. It would be a felony for the person to borrow the gun the night before and transport it themselves to the hunt and take it back to the owners house like every reasonable person would see acceptable.

And that's how bills like that fail- things that sound reasonable in concept get put into bills by people with no clue on the details so they make bad law.

I and a lot of gun owners here have been proposing a good solution that can pass- open NICS up so private sellers can use it, so you eliminate the hassle of trips to a gun dealer and paying them fees for every check. It's 2016 there is no reason why there can't be an app and website for that.