Gun control advocates seems to specialize in creating laws that have zero impact on “gun violence.” Case in point: New Orleans’ proposed City ordinance requiring residents to report lost or stolen guns within 48 hours. So let’s say they do. What then? Does anyone honestly think the NOPD is going to devote time and resources to recovering a lost gun? Even if they did, how effective would they be? As for punishing people to whom a recovered “crime gun” is traced, what judge wouldn’t accept the excuse “I didn’t know it was stolen”? In short, the ordinance is feel good security theater. As if you didn’t know.
The game is politics, not crime prevention.
No, there is a real reason behind the law. In Chicago, gang members who managed not to be arrested before the age of 21 get FOID cards and proceed to purchase handguns for their friends. Then when the guns turn up at crime scenes the purchaser on 4473 claims the gun was stolen. This way the Chicago cops have a tool to further investigate and the charge straw purchaser,. Of course if we had a “gun registry”, it starts to become easier to identify straw purchases when someone buys 6 SD9VEs in a year.
@Binder – No, no there isn’t any real reason behind the law whatsoever. Don’t even bother mentioning CHIRAQ, either, because the prosecutors there simply don’t pursue weapons charges. No, registries don’t give the police any ability to identify straw purchasers, either, being that criminals don’t register their guns to begin with and – as per U.S. v. Haynes – literally cannot be forced to in the first place.
If there is any “reason” behind the law, which again there actually isn’t, it would be to give the police still more tools to turn innocent people into felons. End of story.
The possible threat of $250 fine is supposed to be dissuasive to a gang member? Does that work in Chicago or Indianapolis?
Binder,
Consider a gang member with no criminal record who purchases handguns for fellow gang members. He goes out and purchases 12 handguns. Soon thereafter, police capture a fellow gang member with one of those handguns. The police look up the purchaser in their registry and knock on the purchaser’s door. And the purchaser simply says, “I want to report 12 stolen handguns.” … and our criminal justice system can do absolutely nothing about it.
In case you are thinking, “But, but, but, what about the 48 hour requirement to report stolen firearms?!?!?!? The District Attorney can use that to prosecute people, right?” The straw purchaser can simply tell the District Attorney that he/she did not know that anyone had stolen the handguns until Officer Friendly knocked on their door (at which time the straw purchaser reports 12 stolen handguns) … thus satisfying the requirement to report withing 48 hours and eliminating any way for the District Attorney to prosecute the straw purchaser.
As long as the purchaser refrains from admitting to being a straw purchaser, there is no way that our criminal justice system can prosecute him/her. And last time I checked, criminals were pretty good at NOT providing confessions to crimes when there is no way for government to prosecute them otherwise. This is why mandatory registration of firearm purchases and mandatory reporting of stolen firearms will do nothing to stop straw purchases.
If that proves to be any problem at all, just report them all stolen as soon as you’ve sold them. And using 4473s to establish a registry is a federal felony, unless memory has failed me. But the goal is clear at any rate, further pursuit of the ever elusive goal, a reliable registry. For some reason, I’ve never heard any specifics on just how a registry would or even could affect anything at all, either in a positive or negative way, except for 2 specific items. 1) it would end up being enormously expensive, both to build and then to maintain and update. And 2) it would facilitate confiscation, mostly by allowing police to murder everyone in a building in order to reach the guns. Otherwise, you wouldn’t know who to kill.
Wont the “bad guys” just say, “I didn’t know it was stolen!”.
This will do nothing.
They can also say “He was coming right for me!” after shooting someone but that doesn’t mean it will be believed.
Hannibal,
See my comment above.
A straw purchaser can purchase a dozen handguns, put them in a box, and put the box some place “out of sight, out of mind”. All he/she has to do is tell police that he/she never checks on that box and had no idea that anyone had stolen the contents. Thus there is not a single shred of evidence that that person is a straw purchaser. How is a jury supposed to convict on that?
I believe that the preferred term is now “Thinning the herd”.
That’s why we have to fight every single anti-gun law because the ignorant politicians keep making laws that do nothing. CA in point. They keep on and on and on with ignorant worthless laws like the damn Energizer Bunny! It keeps going and going………
If they’d make a law that would actually do something that didn’t infringe on 2A rights, gun owners could get behind it.
It’s *not* a “ignorant worthless law”, it’s a key part of the machinery of firearm confiscation.
As soon as the left installs a Progressive SCOTUS associate justice, we will have a court case decided that universal gun registration will be deemed Constitutional and be the law of the land.
At that point, all firearms ‘forgotten about’ and – or ‘lost in boating accidents’ will be forgotten and forever lost under threat of prison time.
Think along the lines of an un-registered NFA device you find in an old trunk in an attic.
They want that for *all* guns…
Cake
Half cake
Half of half
Half of half of half
Half of half of half of half
and so on…
New Orleans is such a crap hole and they can’t seem to figure that out. (Well, they can but it’d mean that the gov’t is at fault and they can’t have that.) And after Katrina, it spread to Houston, more than it was before………..
Don’t forget Dallas.
I have a friend who is a Houston police officer . He told me after Katrina the vast majority of perps has new Orleans Id on them. Crime skyrocketed when the fema money ran out
Wait while I put on my “surprised” face.
Another law to make a gun owner a criminal.
Let’s say the police want to confiscate your guns, for whatever reason….. They show up and some of guns are ‘missing’, now the gun owner is charged with a crime and suddenly you can’t buy a gun anymore. This isn’t about crime, it’s about gun control.
My gun is missing? Well forever more, I had no idea! I wonder when that happened?
I see. 20 years in prison! BANG! Next case.
Well, guns cant drown in the boat accident no more. Hmmmm, sold my guns to Jim two years ago. Oh sorry to hear he died last week.I do recall seeing that in the obiturary now that you mention it. The relatives found no guns? Well they didnt no much about Jim, probably buried them somewhere.
Is there registration in Louisiana? Background checks for private sales? Then this is unenforceable. NO should be proud for wasting everyone’s time.
Most gang “gun guys” just purchase from a FFL or gun shop. A gun guy is just a gang member with no record who purchases guns for profit. And it is not that easy to charge them, they are not stupid. If you tell them that you are a prohibited person, they are not going to sell to you. So how do you catch them? Honestly, how? They are not going to go into the gun store with you. They are not going to sell to you if you tell them you are out on parole. They are not going to sell over state lines.
I guarantee someone is making money off this law, and off every other law in NO.
Nope and nope and there is tons of people like me that buy, sell and trade from dealers and individuals so often sometimes with a bill of sale sometimes no I honestly couldn’t tell you whom I sold most to because I liost a lot of bill of sales during Katrina when very large pine fell through the middle of my house.
The black liberals in NO have a long history of being anti-gun, which hasn’t had any positive impact. I’ll never forget the story of the anti-gun affirmative-action general honore confiscating guns in the wake of Katrina.
I know a couple of professional, upstanding black guys who go to NO sometimes, funny thing is they both have CCW permits from their home state. And not because they concerned about the KKK.
Make criminals out of gun owners and deter purchases.
So why, exactly, wouldn’t I call the police to report that my stuff was stolen? Do people have guns stolen and not contact the police? I’m figuring if someone broken into my house, and then the safe, I’m calling the cops within minutes of finding out. What am I missing here?
You paid for your stuff.
And if there are no signs of a break in?
Mine could have been stolen two weeks ago and I wouldn’t know. They want to make it a crime to not kiss each firearm goodnight, every night.
Well, I suppose that might be fair …
The thing you miss here is that not every person who owns a gun is a hardcore guy with a giant safe who goes in there every week. A lot of gun owners have one or two guns that they keep in a cabinet or locked closet and only visit for the annual deer hunt. It would be easy for a gun theft by a relative or someone a relative let in the home to go un-noticed for a year. The first notice this person might have is the knock on the door by the cops. Should they pay a fine for that? Should they be jailed for assuming they are safe in their home? Or do we risk making people who own weapons even more paranoid than they already are? A lot of people who are small-time gunowners will give up the few that they hav rather than take this risk.
Can’t someone force these nitwits to lead us all through the processing of a “stolen gun report”? Truth be told, I’d bet it winds up in the crapper within minutes.
All this will do, at BEST, is cause those who discover one of their guns is stolen, to not report it once 49 hours have passed. Excellent logic.
New Orleans’ proposed City ordinance requiring residents to report lost or stolen guns within 48 hours.
Within 48 hours of what?
This the loophole. Should they find one of your guns at a crime scene and magically divine it’s yours they have to prove you knew it was missing more than 2 days ago.
The clock starts ticking when they tell you you’re gun was found at a scene. At that moment it’s lost and stolen. The burden is on them to somehow prove you knew it was missing more than two days ago.
Guns are pretty small compared to, say , a car which takes up your driveway. Unless they can force everyone to maintain logs of all guns verified several times a day then this law pounds salt.
This law has one goal: add another legal risk to owning a firearm.
These laws do nothing worthwhile. Essentially they are “because we can” legislation.
Their only purpose is to annoy law-abiding citizens and increase bureaucracy for its own sake.
That’s what you get when you keep electing Democrats.
They tried a B.S. ordinance like that here in indy. The TTAG even covered it. Fortunately though, the outgoing mayor vetoed it before he left. Hope the same for NO.
That’ll teach those monuments…
Politically, they need to be seen “doing something”. However that cannot involve actually going after the criminals as their constituents are the criminals, and their friends,mothers, baby mommas, and what not. Not to mention the whining of social justice types if they actually send the scumbags to prison. Their solution is to obfuscate and pretend the inability of their citizens to make it through the day without killing someone is the fault of gun owners.
New Orleans is trying to out-hustle California. This season’s SB 894 would provide a generous five days, not just 48 hours.
I could ignore 5 days, just as easily as 48 hours. Kiss my grits.
This is the same New Orleans PD that participated in the ILLEGAL confiscation of firearms and has yet
to return the bulk of them?
Go pound sand.
In Simi Valley, CA (a relatively conservative city) we had a handgun stolen from our vehicle, we reported right away, and contrary to our expectations, they didn’t just fill out a report, they immediately tasked resources to track it down. We had the gun back in 24 hours. Granted this is anecdotal and Simi is a smaller city.
Immediately reporting the theft of a firearm is a no brainier. I am in favor of a law to that effect, although any penalties associated with should be very minor
Comments are closed.