A 2014 review in the Annals of Internal Medicine concluded having a firearm in the home, even when it’s properly stored, doubles your risk of becoming a victim of homicide and triples the risk of suicide. [0]
Guns are intrinsically dangerous, in much the same way as certain aggressive dog breeds and industrial explosives. While many/most people can safely raise rottweilers, store dynamite, and keep guns, some will not. Is there a marginal benefit associated with the removal of each marginal gun? Obviously. Is gun ownership reduction a legitimate policy goal? Obviously. It's strange that you think otherwise.
> In general, modern legal systems reject holding one person responsible for the crime of another. If a mass shooter lawfully purchases a firearm, what possible liability could a dealer have?
Part of a more involved system of background checks would necessarily involve more action by dealers to verify that the customer's purchase is legal. Prosecuting and holding liable individuals who fail to follow established precautions when selling dangerous products is not unusual.
[0] https://annals.org/aim/fullarticle/1814426/accessibility-fir...
It doesn't say that, exactly, since it doesn't distinguish between properly stored and not properly stored cases. It is a meta-analysis; they took a bunch of papers and did the best they could. We can't say that if they're properly stored it's about the same, or worse, or better.
It also acknowledged some methodological limitations, including studying overall death rates, and not specifically deaths due to guns:
...we considered studies of suicide and homicide victimization by any means, and firearm-specific outcomes may differ.
Another issue the study encountered, was that gun ownership rates were not directly available to many of the aggregated studies, which therefore relied on various proxies.
What makes relying on a study like this to initiate a policy of reducing gun ownership not premature?
Part of a more involved system of background checks would necessarily involve more action by dealers to verify that the customer's purchase is legal. Prosecuting and holding liable individuals who fail to follow established precautions when selling dangerous products is not unusual.
We do have laws like this already -- FFLs do background checks for every purchase and if they fail to do so, they can lose their license. What are the expansions that you'd like to see?
We already have background checks. Licensed dealers who fail to follow the law lose their license and are prosecuted. The atf has no difficulty in enforcing that.
And as already posted, there’s really no useful information in that “review”.
Guns that are stolen would carry a punishment for the last registered owner?
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/11/12/us/gun-traffi...
Of course authorities don’t always pay attention to registration changes — one UK police force sent me a speeding ticket for a car I had sold nine months previously, even though the DVLA had actually registered the sale and transfer of ownership.
30 rounds is standard? That's terrifying.
Anecdata but the NZ shooter had large clips (many dual large clips taped together in fact), and Las Vegas shooter had some crazy "niche" shit.
If it's so niche that nobody cares then what's the harm in restricting things like that? People don't need 40 round magazines to shoot targets.
They don't even need semi-auto to shoot targets, but that's crazy talk.
The same thing goes for asking “Why do you need that?” and if people don’t have a reason you like, taking that as a basis for restriction. In a free society, the people don’t need a reason — we can do what we like. It’s the government that needs a reason. We should be questioning proposed policies, with an eye to the public benefit, not because of any love of guns, but merely out of a basic requirement for government accountability.
Not sure if you're joking there -- maybe you meant magazines?
Like so many other gun regulation ideas, it seems superficially reasonable based on "danger" but it's almost never the case that items like that contributed measurably to gun deaths. They don't need to be banned -- they are niche items. Mass shooters who have access to them rarely use them. They rarely use 40 or 50 round magazines. Indeed, people rarely purchase magazines larger than the standard 30 rounds.
We can reduce gun ownership...
That is not a legitimate policy goal. The earlier poster points out that gun ownership is not correlated with crime at all. We shouldn't set policy goals that are merely about partisanship -- trying to cut down on gun owners because we don't like them -- rather than a clear public benefit.
...increasing liability for dealers.
I would like to better understand what you have in mind here. In general, modern legal systems reject holding one person responsible for the crime of another. If a mass shooter lawfully purchases a firearm, what possible liability could a dealer have?