Morally, the seller deserves a severe beating. You have to be an idiot to sell a firearm to someone you don't know without doing a reasonable investigation of him.
Uhm, like namely, so what the f*** do you want the seller to do? Conduct a background check that he has no facility to do so with? In lots of normal states people aren't morons and don't treat a gun any differently than they would a lawnmower, circular saw or any other tool. Investigation? With what? You want someone to pay an investigator like $500-$1000 or more before doing a gun sale, to "investigate" someone? Or are you basically suggesting he should have used an FFL and ate the transfer fee? (because private sales are legal, most buyers are reluctant to pay any kind of a transfer fee ). Or are you suggesting the seller should only sell to people with a carry permit (but even this really isn't a "hot" background check, its easy for a person to have a carry license that's facially valid but would not withstand a renewal; authorities don't go out and check peoples BG every day and then come and seize the carry license if you're suddenly out of compliance. I want to say Kansas or some state like that does annual "hot" background checks on carry license holders via NICS or something, but they are the exception rather than the rule. ) Regardless that's a bogus requirement, given a lot of people buy guns that do not or cannot carry anyways.
Would you say the same thing if he unknowingly sold a car to a functional alcoholic? And then a week later the buyer drives the car down the wrong side of the road and kills a bus full of nuns because he was sauced? Of course not- why- because hopefully you're not going to apply retard logic like an anti does, to a motor vehicle despite the fact that it basically got used as a deadly weapon against innocent people!
Oh, I hear it now "but mike this is about guns and joe public doesn't see it that way cuz guns are for killin! ".... well guess what, when gun owners start treating "guns as being special and extra killy" in what I would call contexts and spaces where they certainly shouldn't be treated as such, eventually the retard joe public perception becomes reality, and we end up digging our own grave on that front. Why give the antis a free space by allowing THEM to
define that? This country existed for like over 2 centuries, during the most of which, there was little or no gun
control in most places wrt the buying and selling of guns, and somehow, only since like, the 60s or so, did "problems" seem to arise where firearms were used in "sensational" crimes. Somehow I think this trend has
very little to do with guns, and a lot to do with everything else that nobody wants to talk about.
Even if the assertion is true, and this guy drove around the background check, I have a few points to lay out with
that...
-This shows the overall futility of forcing a background check vs trying to stop a criminal act. Bad people will actively seek out to circumvent such checks until they succeed. Hell this has been going on since columbine, those two kids used straw buyers and bought guns illegally from people that should have known better, etc. One of the sellers even went to jail over it, too. Laws and background checks might clean up some of the mess afterwards but
they're not going to effectively stop anything.
-Most guns used in crimes didn't come from an otherwise legal private sale. Even if we look at the last dozen or so mass shootings, most of the guns were procured lawfully at least at the time of sale. Things like columbine or this incident (if true) where the perp drove around the blockade tend to be the exception rather than the rule. Nobody brings this up though because it's "uncomfortable" to talk about how background checks are so great, yet mass shooter perps seem to pass background checks all the time.... because they don't want to be forced to admit that they're talking about "improving something that's already been shown time and time again to NOT WORK. "
-The overwhelming majority of guns sold privately in the US between same state residents don't end up being used
in sensationalist crimes. Hell the overwhelming majority of guns period sold in the US lawfully don't end up being used in crimes period. I think everyone loses sight of this. In the not too distant future if the pols keep pushing buttons the guns per capita will easily exceed a 1 : 1 ratio if it hasn't already. And yet despite having the most guns in private hands we are far from the most violent country, particularly once you get past the urban shithole
areas which take up like maybe 5% of the land mass in the US.
Probably because that's very likely what the LAW says YOU HAVE TO DO there... Much like in NH RSA 159, a PR license is required BY LAW to sell a handgun to a person not otherwise personally known to you. Nobody is requiring that shit for the hell of it "because it feels good morally" or any BS like that. They require it because it'sIn VA, where private sales are commonplace and the state's gun trading website for private sales is very active, the standard proviso in FS ads is "VA license and CHP" (also known as "good guy papers") required.
the law, and the cost of non-compliance is likely high.
-Mike