[jacobolus]

Absolutely, a regulated market would be better than a black market.

If every gun and every bullet were marked, all sales (or losses e.g. to theft) required registration with a central registry with the new owner requiring a proper license (including criminal background check, etc.), and distributors/manufacturers/registered owners were held liable for damages in the case of improper use, and with potential for their ownership/distribution license to be revoked, guns would become a lot safer. (Exactly what breakdown of liability is up for debate, but currently there is none whatsoever.)

Almost nobody has a problem with “gun ownership” in the abstract, and some type of gun ownership is legal in most parts of the world. The problems are with e.g. semiautomatic rifles being purchased on the black market and then used to shoot up schools, criminals trivially and untraceably getting their hands on as many guns as they want, people leaving guns lying around in places where children can play with them, or huge numbers of untraceable guns getting smuggled across the border into the hands of Mexican drug cartels.

[wildmusings]

>and distributors/manufacturers/registered owners were held liable for damages in the case of improper use, and with potential for their ownership/distribution license to be revoked, guns would become a lot safer.

My understanding is that this is just an attempt by gun-control activists to effectively ban gun sales to consumers. How can the gun manufacturer be responsible for how the gun is used? Their job is to make the gun to the advertised spec, not keep the peace. You can't sue the knife-maker when you get stabbed. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding what you mean by "liability for damages in the case of improper use"?

[jacobolus]

If a manufacturer or distributor sells a bunch of guns off-the-books to a criminal gang, and one of those is then used in a murder, the distributor should be liable in some way.

If there were a proper gun registry and if improper gun use resulted in liability for the last documented owner, it would be much more difficult for criminals to hide the guns’ ownership / distribution history, because distributors and owners would have a strong incentive to properly report sales.

In the system we have now, the gun show / flea market / second-hand sales “loophole” is so wide as to basically render gun licensing and tracking requirements entirely useless. cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_show_loophole

Think about the way we currently regulate automobiles. Every automobile has a documented ownership history and registration, and every automobile driver needs to pass a set of tests in order to obtain a license.

[chrishynes]

A manufacturer or distributor selling guns "off the books" is already highly illegal. Anyone doing that will incur a fat stack of felonies.

Are you unaware of that? Or proposing that we make it even more illegal?

[jacobolus]

Here are the first two results in a 20 second web search I just did. I don’t have the weeks of free time it would take to make a comprehensive research report on this subject (feel free to do that as an exercise, I’d love to read your final document), but needless to say, the current level of gun registration and tracking in this country is nowhere near as complete as the tracking of e.g. automobiles. The Wikipedia article above about the “gun show loophole” also does a reasonable job filling in some context.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/guns/procon/gu...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/29/gun-crime-tracing-w...

[wildmusings]

I hope that we never have national gun registration in the US. Just recently, California passed a law allowing the police to confiscate your firearms on the sole basis of a family member's or ex's claim that you're a danger to yourself or someone else. For 21 days, you don't even get a chance to defend yourself. The confiscation and ban of gun ownership can then be extended for one year, without a conviction for a single crime.

You also have politicians all over the country who openly admit that they would ban and confiscate all guns if they could. You have half of the Supreme Court willfully misreading the Second Amendment as giving no rights to people, only to states.

It's easy to see where this is going. Everyone who values their right to keep and bear arms will fight tooth and nail against any national registration proposal.

[chrishynes]

Again, all of those methods in the PBS article are already highly illegal... Straw buying, unlicensed distribution, theft...

Shall we make them more illegal? Or are you unaware that they are illegal already?

[koenigdavidmj]

> or huge numbers of untraceable guns getting smuggled across the border into the hands of Mexican drug cartels.

Your own government is the worst offender of this in recent memory.