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Post by Doug on Oct 5, 2015 16:29:03 GMT -5
Any one who has a table at a gun show selling guns is a licensed dealer. I spent twenty years in the convention and trade show business. Granted, most of our clients that went to trade shows were large manufacturers like ATK, but a lot of individuals set up tables at those same shows. I'm not aware of any requirement that someone be a licensed dealer to buy space at a show. You just need to cough up the booth fee. It's been a promoter thing for years. Cough up fee sell ammo, reloading eq, NRA t-shirts etc but selling guns is dealers, some small and some large. It wasn't always that way but with the media stuff I can no longer pay a booth fee and sell my guns, as far as I know all the gun show promoters (couple of dozen around the country) have been doing that for years. The justification is if you rent space you are a business. Want to buy an individuals gun at a show they are walking around with signs on their back or taped to a gun stock. Used to be more of those but out of a few thousand at the gun show Sat I think I saw about 8-10 in almost 3 hr. Which is in reality no different than posting a notice on the BB at the laundry mat. I can think of 2 guns I have bought from laundry mat ads.
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Post by Doug on Oct 5, 2015 16:32:34 GMT -5
Violation of the Constitution is the worst crime that can be committed in the US. Doesn't matter if it's gun laws or sending troops to war without a congressional Declaration of War it's the most serious crime in the US. "highest law of the land"
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Post by billhammond on Oct 5, 2015 17:21:19 GMT -5
Violation of the Constitution is the worst crime that can be committed in the US. Doesn't matter if it's gun laws or sending troops to war without a congressional Declaration of War it's the most serious crime in the US. "highest law of the land" I understand what you believe, Doug, and why you believe it. But I wouldn't want to be you when you look look into the eye of a grieving relative among the thousands of Americans killed every year by easily procured guns, often without background checks, and tell them that anyone voting for a gun control law has committed a crime worse than the murderer of their loved one.
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Post by brucemacneill on Oct 5, 2015 18:02:17 GMT -5
I have mixed emotions about this and I don't own a gun or the eyesight to use one anymore. Having said that, Bill being our newsie guy, can you give me an example of any one of these shooting incidents that could have been stopped by some law that isn't already in place? I've never seen one in any story I've read about one of these shooting incidents. Your research department may have something. I don't think Google would be a good source because most of the stuff on the web is BS at best. Do you have anything?
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Post by jdd2 on Oct 5, 2015 19:32:20 GMT -5
Over here, for drunk drivers: The passengers in the car are also fined (about $1675 at today's rates), along with the car owner and the place that served the alcohol also being liable.
Analogously, that trailer park parent, whose 11 year old boy just used a 12 gauge to kill his neighbor's little girl, should also be on trial for murder.
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Post by billhammond on Oct 5, 2015 23:21:30 GMT -5
Food for thought:
OK. I have nothing to lose, so I’m going to go all the way out to the edge on this gun issue.
In 2005, I watched as my friends at Red Lake were killed, traumatized and besieged by reporters, then forgotten, after a confused and alienated kid drove to the school where I had worked and killed seven people.
I am, as I write this, on a plane back to my home in Portland, Ore., 180 miles north of the mass-murder site in the town of Roseburg, where I used to buy car parts when I lived in the Oregon woods many years ago and where I have visited on my journeys south through the magical Oregon countryside.
I shop at the Clackamas mall where in 2012 one more confused white kid brought out a gun and killed three people for no reason that any of us can fathom — or should have to fathom.
And all of the politicians, no matter how pained and grieved, are dancing around the issue of guns with vague platitudes about the need for mental health services, background checks, the necessity of enlisting the support of responsible gun owners, and on and on.
But let’s cut to the chase: It’s guns, pure and simple. Guns.
So, let’s go to it.
What is it about guns that so obsesses Americans? Yes, I know all about the Second Amendment and how it supposedly protects our rights. I know all about the perceived slippery slope into governmental control of our lives. I know about beard boys in Idaho wearing camouflage and face paint and crawling through the woods to hold out against an upcoming takeover by the fascist government, and about frightened fathers and mothers keeping guns in their houses in cities and suburbs to protect against intruders. I know about all of this.
But forget all of that. Tell me about guns.
There are otherwise perfectly normal human beings in northern Minnesota, where I lived, who can barely feed their families but who have 25 rifles, pistols and semi-automatic weapons in their closets.
Why? You don’t have 25 refrigerators, or 25 pipe wrenches or 25 of anything other than perhaps baseball caps and pairs of shoes, and those things are questionable enough. So, what is it about a gun? Is it some feeling of power? Is there some crypto-sexual thrill in holding it? Shooting it? Stroking it?
I know I’m being a bit demeaning, but, damn it, I simply can’t understand. And, frankly, I don’t want to. I am sick of hearing arguments for these cruel and lethal objects. They scare me, they disgust me and it makes me ashamed that such an adolescent and selfish obsession can be one of the few sacrosanct things in our country.
What drives it? Why are we like this?
Sometimes I think it is part of this culture of fear that comes with our out-of-control capitalist society where every advertisement is based on fear and perceived deficiency, and a gun is just the physical embodiment of a sense of control. Sometimes I think it has a subterranean racism at its heart, where fear of the terrifying black man at the door drives white people to want to have the fantasy of a protective weapon at hand.
Sometimes I think it is the residual frontier ethic. But the Canadians have every bit as strong a frontier ethic, and they don’t share this cultural mental illness.
And, yes, that’s what it is — a cultural mental illness, fomented and fanned by an armament industry that needs, or, at least, wants every man, woman and child to be packing a weapon in the name of freedom or security or whatever abstraction they can sell us.
But, my God, children are dying, and they are dying from guns. No amount of counseling or monitoring or background checks is going to stop this. People will get guns like teenagers get beer, and no amount of laws will stop it.
Consider the sheriff in Roseburg. He stated quite forthrightly that he would not enforce any federal gun laws, nor would he allow his deputies to do so. And now he is looking in the faces of the mothers and fathers and husbands and wives of the dead. How can he sleep at night? Is he at least a little conflicted?
Sadly, probably not. To him, it wasn’t a gun that killed all those people. It was a person. And the fact that it was a gun in the hand of that person, just as it was a gun in the hand of the killer at Red Lake and the killers at Columbine and the killer at the Aurora movie theater and the killer in every other mass murder in America doesn’t register with him or people like him. It is a mind-boggling disconnect that simply beggars the imagination.
So, what will stop it? One and only one thing: getting rid of guns on our streets. And this is no easy task. It cannot be done by fiat; it cannot be done in one legislative swoop. It can only be done by changing hearts and minds, and that takes time.
There needs to be incremental change — make it illegal to own handguns and semiautomatics for starters, then begin confiscating them as they come in contact with the legal system. Stop the manufacture of them. Then get beneath this and start to educate our children to the reality that compassion will eventually trump fear and that there is nothing magical or mystical about a piece of metal (or, sadly, plastic) that can kill at a distance. In fact, it is simply sick to look at them as problem solvers.
So, go ahead, unfriend me, refuse to buy my books, write me enraged e-mails filled with the tired old tropes.
But, for the love of Jesus and Mary and Buddha and things that go bump in the night, take a look in the mirror and ask why this piece of metal that is essentially a killing machine is so damn important to you.
Red Lake. Clackamas Town Center. Roseburg. Coming soon to a neighborhood near you. And you will be shocked and you will be surprised and you will say, “This was such a nice, quiet community. Things like this aren’t supposed to happen here.”
Well, sorry. They aren’t supposed to happen in your particular “here,” but they will. And if you prevaricate and trot out tired old bromides and talk about abstractions while another child’s face gets blown off by a gun, the blood is on your hands.
Kent Nerburn, a Minnesota native, is an author in Lake Oswego, Ore. (kentnerburn.com).
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Post by jdd2 on Oct 6, 2015 0:05:18 GMT -5
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Post by millring on Oct 6, 2015 5:54:57 GMT -5
Yes, I know all about the Second Amendment and how it supposedly protects our rights. Got it wrong right out of the chute.
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Post by fauxmaha on Oct 6, 2015 6:15:24 GMT -5
The current debate is welcome.
I'll give Obama credit, in a way, for being honest about it. For years, we've been told we need "reasonable, common sense gun laws", and freedom proponents have responded by saying "they want to confiscate our guns" and gun-control proponents have responded by saying "you are just scare mongering. No one is talking about confiscating your guns. We just want reasonable, common sense gun laws".
Obama ended that.
You can't talk admiringly about the UK and Aussie gun laws (for all practical purposes, complete bans on the private ownership of firearms) as models for "reasonable, common sense" gun laws and then say you aren't for a complete ban on private ownership of firearms.
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Post by fauxmaha on Oct 6, 2015 6:23:06 GMT -5
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Post by fauxmaha on Oct 6, 2015 6:27:11 GMT -5
if you prevaricate and trot out tired old bromides and talk about abstractions while another child’s face gets blown off by a gun, the blood is on your hands. "The welfare of humanity is always the alibi of tyrants." It's for the children, you know. Always for the children.
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Post by Marshall on Oct 6, 2015 7:43:10 GMT -5
It's the crypto-sexual thrill thing.
What we really need is cheap Viagra. Then the primal need for big guns will disappear.
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Post by Doug on Oct 6, 2015 7:44:22 GMT -5
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Post by Marshall on Oct 6, 2015 7:54:54 GMT -5
Yes, I know all about the Second Amendment and how it supposedly protects our rights. Got it wrong right out of the chute. So, what's the correct start?
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Post by millring on Oct 6, 2015 7:58:57 GMT -5
Got it wrong right out of the chute. So, what's the correct start? What he's doing here is sort of cheating the debate. He's claiming a sort of "asked-and-answered" immunity to discussing the central issue (or one of the central issues) of the debate.
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Post by Marshall on Oct 6, 2015 8:00:36 GMT -5
The current debate is welcome. I'll give Obama credit, in a way, for being honest about it. For years, we've been told we need "reasonable, common sense gun laws", and freedom proponents have responded by saying "they want to confiscate our guns" and gun-control proponents have responded by saying "you are just scare mongering. No one is talking about confiscating your guns. We just want reasonable, common sense gun laws". Obama ended that. You can't talk admiringly about the UK and Aussie gun laws (for all practical purposes, complete bans on the private ownership of firearms) as models for "reasonable, common sense" gun laws and then say you aren't for a complete ban on private ownership of firearms. That's the logical extension of the argument. The Rosedale and Sandyhook weapons were all legally purchased. Law abiding properly handled transactions within the framework of the laws in place. These are not Saturday night specials, or back-alley under-the-counter smuggled-in weapons. So, the laws and background checks aren't scratching the surface on keeping assault weapons out of the hands of loonie people. They never will.
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Post by Marshall on Oct 6, 2015 8:01:16 GMT -5
So, what's the correct start? What he's doing here is sort of cheating the debate. He's claiming a sort of "asked-and-answered" immunity to discussing the central issue (or one of the central issues) of the debate. And that is?
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Post by millring on Oct 6, 2015 8:51:09 GMT -5
What he's doing here is sort of cheating the debate. He's claiming a sort of "asked-and-answered" immunity to discussing the central issue (or one of the central issues) of the debate. And that is? He assumes the illegitimacy of the Constitution as either the last word (unless changed by due process of amendment) or as reasonable when followed. I don't see a good answer to the gun debate. I'm an un-armed guy. I've never been part of the gun culture. But I can't bring myself to accept the simplistic answer that the problem doesn't center around the millions of guns already in circulation and that, until a solution is found for that, the Constitution does tell the government it is not allowed to keep us from arming ourselves. I live in Warsaw. I'll take my chances. I always have. But I admit that as I see the world become increasingly materialist (the philosophy, not consumerist), with little but might-makes-right restraint on violence, it's getting harder rather than easier to make the case that the law-abiding should simply give up their guns. The non-law-abiding aren't.
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Post by Marshall on Oct 6, 2015 9:11:18 GMT -5
He assumes the illegitimacy of the Constitution as either the last word (unless changed by due process of amendment) or as reasonable when followed. . . , OK. I see where you're going to (or coming from). And it's a very valid point. If any law is passed (no matter what) that pertains to guns, it will most certainly end up in a challenge before the SCOTUS. And the Constitutionality of the 2nd Amendment would most likely make it null and void, unless the Supremes would find a convoluted way to trump with some other Constitutional right. A new Constitutional Amendment would be the only iron clad legal argument. But we know that there's not a snowball's chance in Hell that all the states would get behind that. Do all the states have to ratify an Amendment? I can't remember. Probably so. That's how Virginia got the "Guns and Well Regulated Militia" in the constitution; so they could keep down slave rebellions; in order to pass the Constitution in the first place. The whole slavery thing has so affected this nation. We live with the artifacts of it every day. What a sad testimony to man's inhumanity towards man.
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Post by Marshall on Oct 6, 2015 9:20:55 GMT -5
But;
We already control the sales of tanks and howitzers and machine guns. Somehow the "Well Regulated Militia" doesn't apply to ownership of these weapons. It would seem that a ban on assault type weaponry would be possible to squeak by the Supremes.
Handguns and hunting rifles are never going to get banned. (Though high capacity magazines for handguns could. But that ban would be so easy to get around that you have to wonder about it's effectiveness. But it might have kept high capacity fire power out of the hands of the loonies at Sandyhook and Rosedale. Those were legal purchases gone awry).
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