tcmay@got.net (Skippy) wrote: ! At 4:33 AM 9/2/96, qut@netcom.com (Net God) wrote: ! ! >Contrary to popular fiction, ALL firearms have been permanently ! >registered since the 1968 Gun Control Act. The media monopoly lies when ! >they say the contrary. ! ! Nope. Gun sales between individuals without any paperwork were fully legal ! in some places until recently (and may still be fully legal...I can only ! speak of California). So? I was talking about NEW sales of firearms from license holders. Let's consider improving the future rather than preserving the past, shall we? ! >From 1974 until a couple of years ago, I bought and sold a dozen or more ! rifles, handguns, and even Evil Assault Weapons, mostly through fully legal ! gun shows. I even sold a .357 Smith to some guy, made a joke about how ! great these gun shows were and how great it was to be able to just take ! cash and hand over a gun without any paperwork...the guy laughed and said ! he was a San Jose cop. I felt nervous for a few seconds, but quickly ! realized there was no law *I* was breaking, so I laughed too. ! ! Most of these guns I kept no records on, nor did any laws say I had to. ! ! (A few years ago it became necessary for even private citizen-units to ! obtain the proper firearms transfer papers from the gubment. I wanted to ! sell a laser-equipped Heckler & Koch SP-89 without creating a paper trail ! (as I'd not had one when I acquired the piece a few years earlier), so a ! friend of mine used his friendly neighborhood libertarian FFL dealer, who ! has a policy that the stack of transfer forms he is required to keep on ! file will mysteriously burn up if the Feds ever seek out his records. (Who ! knows if he'll abide by this policy, but the point is that there are ! literally tens of thousands of these "kitchen table FFL dealers," and no ! computerized filing of records. This is one reason I quit the NRA: they are ! advocating the "instant check." Such an instant check would mean massive ! computerization of all files, and of course cross-referencing to files on ! citizens. This would be much worse than the "paper chaos" of stacks of ! firearms paperwork sitting in dusty filing cabinets. I'll take a 10-day ! ineffectual waiting period to a Big Brother database of all purchasers.) So you'ld prefer the security of obscurity? I'd prefer to have much more government protected rights, openly. Do you belive the civil courts have a role in protecting people's rights? If so, then "government protected rights." ! >BTW, I muse that the issue of guns, drugs and censorship make an ! >excellent litmus test for libertarians: either you support the ! >legalization of, all of, or your a fake. ! ! I'm not sure what the "legalization of censorship" would mean, though I ! support the right of anyone to screen out what they choose not to read or ! view. And I support the right of companies to decide what materials to buy, ! have viewed by employees, etc. (So if the "Valley Lesbigays" want to show a ! tape at Hewlett-Packard, H-P can just say "Nope--we're not interested.) ! ! I fully support legalization of all drugs, all guns, and am unalterably ! opposed to any form of government censorship. I meant the good side of the censorship issue! But I also support enforcement of the anti-trust laws, so some would view the court enforced break up of illegal collusion of the media to crush competition as "government censorship."