Gun Sales Halted By FBI Computer Glitch

Anonymous Coward writes: "The Associated Press reports that all gun sales in the U.S. have been stopped [temporarily]. This because of a glitch in the FBI's computers. Hey -- why didn't we think of this before? What a way to reduce crime and stop the bloodshed!" Perhaps one day the entire world will be as safe as Washington, D.C. and other officially disarmed zones.

Comments

Gun Registration?

[psin psycle]

Being from Canada I'm not up on US gun registration rules. My understanding is that guns don't have to be registered at all. (In Canada I'm pretty sure they don't)

A good reason for not registering guns, is to protect the people who have them in times of civil war. During times of civil war or civil unrest gun owners have the ability to protect themselves from totalitarian governments. They have the resources needed to fight for our freedom. Now, if the governments know who has all the guns, then they can just go out to all the gun owners and collect them.

Doing a background check before selling a gun seems like a good idea to me. Wouldn't want to be handing guns to known criminals. (although I'm sure criminals could get guns anyway) With the FBI doing a background check on every gun purchase, then guns don't need to be registered to know where they are. The FBI will have massive lists of everyone who has ever bought a gun. If the government ever wants to, they can march around and take those guns away with little or no resistance.

The right to bare arms is all about protecting yourself from the government. I don't see how you can do this if the government knows how well you are armed.

Re:Gun Registration?

[|deity|]

The right to bare arms is all about protecting yourself from the government. I don't see how you can do this if the government knows how well you are armed.

That's the way it should be but in America we have all these people that grew up in large urban war zones and they think if they could just get guns away from people it would solve all of their problems. Rather then face the social issues which cause crime governments try to cure the problem by treating the symptoms and don't even do a very good job of that.

I grew up in a rural area and knew how to shoot a gun or a bow, better then many people before I was twelve. No one ever had to worry about me accidentally shooting someone or myself because I was taught firearm safety from the moment I was old enough to recognize what a gun was. I was never allowed to use a gun unless supervised until I was mature enough to be trusted with a gun.

Everyone that knows history knows that the reason that we have the right to bear arms in the US is because the British tried to deny the colonists that right and this made the American revolution that much harder. That right was given to the people of the united states, as a last resort, in case our government ever became tyranical.

Fear the government that fears your guns. It's a true enough statement, what would a just government have to fear from content citizens. Fear the government that fears your computer. Information and weaponry are two of the things that the government doesn't want you to have.

Sorry if I offended anyone but I feel strongly that if people don't want guns then they should refrain from buying them. Don't ask the government to take away my rights because you don't like guns.

BTW - This shut down *was* deliberately engineered

[orpheus]

This type of shut down was deliberately engineered into the system.

The FBI explicitly noted that their proposals would shut down gun sales nationally if any one of the 8-15 "key" record systems did not return a response. This was a "feature", not a bug.

Ordinarily, any "hit" any of these computerized databases will refer your inquiry to a criminal records analyst (currently being hired and trained) and either slow your approval or trigger a formal delay (or denial). Only one condition will 'clear' a sale: All databases queried, all systems responding, no records found. The regulations are explicit: if any one system fails to respond, no retail sales will be 'cleared'.

The FBI determines which computer systems will be linked, and is encouraging various agencies to get the interface specs and consider participating. The official list includes at least:

• National Crime Information Center (NCIC, a compilation of networks and systems whose exact makeup is not readily available; includes wanted persons, missing persons, stolen property, stolen cars, stolen boats, fugitives, more. It reportedly can handle a million automated inquiries per day.)
• Interstate Identification Index (III, a linkage of individual states' records; one state police department reports it goes down almost daily)
• National Instant Check System Index (NICS)
• Department of Defense
• Immigration and Naturalization Service
• Veteran's Administration
• FBI State Records files
• State Department

Other computer-system operators that have been mentioned as part of the database network include: Internal Revenue Service; Drug Enforcement Agency; U.S. Border Patrol; U.S. Customs Dept.; a Protective Orders database (there have been vague references to such a thing, related to domestic violence laws, federal availability is unclear) and of course, not to forget, the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms.
_____________

You should be able to get background check FIRST!

[root]

Here's how I think background checks should work:

Go to [local city/county agency] and apply for a background check. They do the check and give you a certificate with your name, SSN, maybe even your photo (so other ID by you is not needed when you use the certificate later), or whatever on it that says you're a clean, upstanding citizen.

It's good for 48 hours or so. Show it to buy 1 or many guns. The seller verfies the cert and your ID (visually only, no logging of info). Or don't use the cert at all and let it expire.

This way, background checks get performed. But no one has to collect information from you to write down or relay to local agencies about how many and what type of guns you bought, if any.

This achieves the purpose of backgrounds checks, thus "stopping criminals" as much as the current system does, right? I'll say it again because this is what the left keeps harping. My plan as described above WILL DO THE BACKGROUND CHECKS AND STOP CRIMINALS FROM BUYING GUNS JUST AS MUCH AS THE CURRENT SYSTEM (which democrats support) DOES!

Will politicians on the left accept this? No. Background checks aren't what they really want. That's just a ruse to dupe the public into supporting the mandates. What they really want to know is exactly who owns what, right down to the serial number so that when the bans come later (like they have so many times before), they can show up at your door and demand [banned make/model of the day].

Did you really think only criminals were being targeted?

Re:Quite frankly...

[rjh]

IANAL, but I do follow the Bill of Rights pretty closely and have performed a fair bit of scholarship on the issue. In the spirit of disclosure, let me say that I possess three firearms and I enjoy participating in the shooting sports.

The overall intent of the Second Amendment is clear: that the citizenry is meant to possess the right to bear arms for the defense of themselves and of the community. This view is fairly universally shared by everyone in the gun control debate, save for those few who claim it only protects sporting purposes. (I cannot grant any credibility to these claims; in all my scholarship on the Bill of Rights, I have never found any hint from any of the Founding Fathers which suggests that any portion of the Bill of Rights is meant to ensure continued sporting activity.)

The real interesting portion comes in how you interpret that original intent. The more militant members of the pro-Second Amendment community (such as the poster I'm originally responding to) claim that all gun control is illegal; the more militant members of the anti-Second Amendment community (such as Sarah Brady) maintain that guns are inherently regulable.

Neither opinion is, in the opinion of the Supreme Court of the United States, worth a bucket of steaming excrement.

The pro-2A crowd fails to notice US v Miller (I think that's the proper cite), where a man convicted of possessing a sawed-off shotgun appealed to the Supreme Court on grounds that it unlawfully violated his rights. The Supreme Court said that it was unable to see how the possession of a sawed-off weapon contributed to the "well-regulated militia" and therefore received no Second Amendment protection.

Sarah Brady and HCI take US v Miller as proof that all weapons are subject to regulation. This is incorrect; a reading of US v Miller indicates that only those weapons which serve no useful purpose to a well-regulated militia can be arbitrarily regulated. In a strict interpretation of the Court's decision, Miller is actually a vindication of the Second Amendment in that the Court comes very close to outright stating that weapons with military applications (such as fully automatic assault rifles, etc.) possess Second Amendment protection.

So. According to Miller, weapons are regulable if they possess no utility to a militia. It's not as clear a victory for the anti-2A crowd as they make it out to be, and it's not a defeat for the pro-2A crowd, either.

That's the most recent Supreme Court cite which addresses the original poster's "all gun control laws are unconstitutional" argument. Now to take the flip side:

The anti-2A crowd likes to forward the idea that the Second Amendment is a collective right; that is to say, that the use of "the people" refers to the State or Nation as a collective whole and not the people individually. This fails both legal and historical tests.

Legally, to interpret the Second Amendment's use of "the people" in a collective sense would force the Supreme Court to interpret every other instance of "the people" in the Constitution similarly. The Court has refused to do this on multiple occasions, and as recently as a few years ago has referred in passing to the Second Amendment as a right which belongs to individuals.

On the historical side, George Mason (I believe) famously stated "Who, then, is the militia? Now it is the whole of the people." That by itself is a fairly clear statement from the Founding Fathers; considering that no-one at the convention spoke after Mason to condemn that assertion, we may assume it enjoyed widespread popularity.

Moreover, national and state militias composed of citizen-soldiers were known to the Founding Fathers. They were referred to as either "elite corps" or "select corps", depending on which authority they were chartered under (ref: Tennessee Law Review. If the intent was to guarantee the national and state rights to assemble armies and National Guard units, the Amendment would have read "Well-regulated select and elite corps being necessary to the security of a free state..."

So the anti-2A argument that the Second Amendment only protects the Army and National Guard units is obviously, blatantly incorrect.

There is still a great deal of litigation going on in an attempt to clarify exactly what the Second Amendment means. For recent Court decisions, I'd suggest you look at Lopez v US, in which the Court found that Congress had overstepped its Constitutional authority by restricting the possession of firearms near schools. This wasn't a Second Amendment case, per se, but it was a clear indication from the Court that it thought Congress had significantly overstepped its mandate.

Also, check out Emerson v US, coming out of Texas, where the Lautenberg Amendment (which strips people of their Second Amendment rights if they have any misdemeanor domestic-abuse conviction or restraining order filed against them) was overturned. In Emerson, a Federal judge found that misdemeanor convictions and restraining orders were insufficient process of law to strip someone of rights guaranteed by the Constitution.

For those of you wondering

[DonkPunch]

A few posts from people outside the U.S. are wondering how gun sales work here.

The Brady Bill five day waiting period has apparently been replaced with a computer-based background check. Coincidentally, I bought my second firearm in 6 years last month and was a little surprised by the new procedure. I provided the store with quite a bit of personal info, including driver's license data and, IIRC, my social security number. They made a phone call, passed the information along, and had the result within a few minutes.

Please understand too that the United States is just that -- a collection of states. Each of these states has its own laws pertaining to firearms. Different states have different attitudes towards guns and there is no guarantee that what is legal in one state is legal in another.

I'm afraid the popular worldview of the United States leans towards a free-for-all Wild West where you can buy handguns out of vending machines. It's not like that. We all want to make sure that guns don't get into the wrong hands, there's just disagreement about whose hands are "wrong" and how we accomplish this. The aforementioned instant background check was actually championed by the NRA as an alternative to the five day waiting period (which had no background check at all).

Also, the same restrictions do not apply when guns are transferred from one person to another without dealer involvement. The Clinton administration considers this a loophole because it allows private individuals to buy and sell guns without much in the way of federal regulation. FWIW, my state has some strong laws against making firearms accessible to minors and known felons. I imagine most other states are similar.

The timing for this could not be worse. Given the weekend's planned demonstrations and the Clinton administration's professed desire to pass additional gun legislation, this will get a lot of media attention. I imagine a lot of people will have a hard time believing this is just a computer glitch. I tend to believe it, but I also remember that this same administration was caught "accidently" accessing secret FBI files on political opponents. Ask me in a week if I still believe it.

I'm not a lawyer and not nearly as up on firearms laws as I used to be, so corrections/clarifications would be most appreciated.