I would love to know how the government would know I had a gun. I paid cash for all of mine. I don't generally post pictures of them and I don't talk about them all that much online.
Oh god, they are here for m...
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That's what I mean. There's no record. In many cases, you don't have to register. You can go on Craigslist and buy a gun from a sketchy dude. You know the one. That one guy. You met him. You bought something from him on Craigslist. Maybe it was a couch; maybe it was a 9mm that'd been used in a double homicide. Maybe you bought it at a gun show. Maybe you got it from Wal Mart. Maybe you had to go for a waiting period, maybe you didn't. Maybe I took the hunting safety course when I was a kid, and maybe my father just walked into Trigger N' Reel in his police uniform and came out with a hunting license for me.
I'm not talking about A LOT of accountability that I'd like to see. Just...some, going forward, if only for newly purchased weapons. God knows there are millions of the other type already freely available from wherever.
It'd depend on how strict the licensing is. Countries like Sweden register every single round of ammunition that goes out. They know how those rounds are spent, and who owns the gun that fires them. That's a lot stricter than I'm concerned with, of course. Just an example of one of the extremes. We're the other end of the extreme. No accountability anywhere for any reason.
But I think that some amount of accountability for which firearm goes where, when it changes hands, who it changes hands to, could do a lot for things like the Justice system. For example, the trial I was talking about earlier was a murder trial, and luckily, the murder weapons, found several months later, were in fact registered to the parties eventually found guilty. The cell phone tower usage put them there, along with witness accounts. The guns matching up with their records were the...well I guess the smoking gun. I have a fairly dense PDF you can read if you'd be interested on that one. It's just one example, but I don't see the harm in tracking data as new guns enter the market. The only real downside I've ever heard from anyone is fear that this politician or that is gonna "come get 'em" from us if they know where they are and how many, and I don't believe that's any more possible than Pence creating Gay conversion camps and rounding up all the homosexuals.
Its not necessarily the "they gonna come get up" that worries me. Its the fact that, let says they have a murder that was committed with a glock 9mm. The person took the weapon with them and didn't leave it at the scene. The police are able to tell from the bullet that it was fired from a glock. They have zero other leads. How do you think the police would proceed if there was a list of every person's guns? I would imagine them finding all the people in the county with that gun and trying to get warrants to inspect said gun because it is possible it could have been used in the crime. They could narrow it down to people who had a possible relationship with the victim but it would lead to people's rights being infringed on the smallest amount of evidence possible.
In your case it looks like they had everything but the smoking gun (literally).
I don't think you can look at a bullet and tell what specific kind of gun fired it.