A Handy Guide

Go here for a handy, interactive guide on how Mayors Against Illegal Guns supports gun control. I'll highlight a few points and expand a bit for anyone who might not know:

Criminalize private gun transfers - They don't actually say this, they say they want to fix the "gun show loophole". The problem is, the only way to fix this "loophole" is to criminalize all private gun transfers.

As anyone who has attended a gun show can tell you, gun dealers do background checks on the spot when they make a sale, and gun dealers make up the majority of sellers at gun shows. Once in a while, two private citizens make a sale or trade, just like they would do at their homes. This is the "loophole" politicians are talking about. If they make it illegal at gun shows, how can they not make it illegal anywhere else?

Prohibit gun sales to those on terrorist watch list - sounds like common sense at first glance, doesn't it? Who wants terrorists to have guns?

But think about that list - who is actually on it? 400,000 people, that's who. How many of them are actual terrorists? No one knows because they haven't been charged with anything. According to the ACLU -

Sen. Edward Kennedy, Georgia Congressman John Lewis, Alaska Congressman Don Young, and Yusuf Islam (the pop star formerly known as Cat Stevens)have been caught up by these lists, as have ordinary Americans with common names such as Robert Johnson, Gary Smith, and John Williams.

The whole "innocent until proven guilty" concept? Right out the window.

Require lost or stolen reporting - This, too, may sound OK at first, but this requirement also carried punishment if the theft is not reported in a timely manner. Who decides what is timely? Not me or you, that's for sure.

Quick story - a friend of mine (not a gun person) had a couple firearms stored in his attic (hey, I said he wasn't a gun person). He had visitors stay over for a few weeks. Those visitors stole the guns. He didn't know for almost a year. How would he have been treated under a lost or stolen law?

Support regional data-sharing on gun owners - Ok, tell me how you do this without creating a gun registry? Or, more like a gun owner registry? Why do the regional authorities need data on gun owners in the first place? Sounds like Big Brother to me.

I'm still hoping someone will bring Memphis Mayoral candidate AC Wharton's membership in the group to light, so he can explain why he supports a group that supports gun control.

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