From: Chuck Kuecker (ckuecker@mcs.net)
Date: Mon May 31 1999 - 06:57:31 MDT
At 09:59 PM 5/30/99 -0500, Joe Dees wrote:
>
>The names of those who do not meet
>the criteria of responsibility (who have been convicted of violent
>criminal offences, spouse and/or child abuse, or judged mentally
>unfit by a legitimate psychiatric review) should be kept in a national
>purchase-prohibited registry, AND NO OTHER NAMES. If you can
>prove (say, with your birth certificate) that you are of age (18
>seems reasonable to me) and your name does not appear on the
>registry, your purchase should go through. These registries should
>apply to, and be accessible by, gun dealers, gun shows, pawn
>shop owners, flea market owners, and any other place where
>weapons may be reasonably expected to be purchased by people
>unknown to the seller. Those who knowingly sell a firearm to
>someone on the prohibited registry should be prosecuted for the
>sale, and held legally liable for any gun-related crime the buyer
>subsequently commits. Those who have these matters pending or
>proceeding in court should have their names provisionally added to
>the registry, to be removed upon acquittal or judgment of mental
>fitness. All decisions should be appealable, but the names should
>remain on the list until the appeals are decided. Trigger locks
>should be required to be sold with every firearm, and if a shooting
>subsequently occurs where the shooter has taken the weapon from
>the owner without consent and the lock was not installed, the
>owner should be held liable for neglect. If the trigger lock was in
>place but subsequently picked or broken off, the owner should not
>be held liable.
>
Sounds like a rework of the Brady Bill and recent Illinois legislation. Why
would anyone object to this?
The Brady bills' original three day waiting (cooloff) period seems to be
just an annoyance to legitimate purchasers, and will probably result in
injury or death to people who otherwise may have been able to defend
themselves. Lawmakers are pressing to reinstate it even in the presence of
the electronic registry.
I especially would like to see the liability waiver for trigger locks added
to present legislation - how the courts can apply negligence penalties to
someone who obviously took care to secure a dangerous item is beyond me.
How do you feel about proposed limits on quantity purchases? I don't like
the idea of govt. telling me how many of an item I can buy - but again
can't see any legitimate reason for someone to need to buy more than one
gun at a time. A truly rabid collector who just came into lots of money,
maybe?
Chuck Kuecker
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