TFred
Regular Member
MUST READ: How "Universal Background Check" turns ALL gun owners into federal felons
Ladies and gentlemen,
One of the most reviled and hated laws on the books of the United States is the Gun Free School Zone Act (GFSZA). This law makes it a federal felony to carry a firearm within 1,000 feet of the edge of a school (K-12) property. It is nearly impossible to live in a suburban area, and literally impossible to live in an urban area without encroaching upon these federally defined "school zones." Almost every otherwise-legal gun carrier is guilty of violating this law at one time or another - even off-duty police officers! The law does provide an exemption for those who hold a state-issued "license to carry" a firearm. I personally believe that Virginia's Concealed Handgun Permit does not meet the "letter" of the requirement to be an exemption, although I'm fairly certain that the feds would not want you to think so.
I have often wondered how in the world did we, the gun rights crowd, ever let this law pass and make it into the books. It's a virtual hammer that the feds hold over nearly every gun owner in the country, and while they choose to not enforce it frequently, it's still there, and it still influences the actions of people just the way the gun grabbers wanted it to.
Fast forward to now. Today. We are faced with S. 649, the falsely named "Safe Communities, Safe Schools Act of 2013". The gun grabbers are shouting their lies as loud and often as they can in the effort to convince the people that Universal Background Checks are widely supported. When you ask the questions in the right way, "the people" will support anything you want them to.
Just like the GFSZA, these new background checks will turn virtually every gun owner in America into a federal felon. We let them impose the GFSZA upon us, we MUST stop this one.
Even after you learn what it does, people will certainly say, that's so ridiculous, they would never prosecute you for that! That's exactly what they say about the GFSZA, and that is the evil genius of these kinds of laws. By never enforcing them, they never make it in front of a judge to be thrown out. But by putting them on the books they do still influence the behavior of law-abiding citizens... and that is their ultimate goal!
Please read this excellent article that outlines the common, every-day activities that nearly all gun owners do at some point in their lives...activities which will make you a federal felon, if this bill becomes law.
We lost the GFSZA battle. We cannot lose this one!
TFred
Excerpts from the above-linked article:
Ladies and gentlemen,
One of the most reviled and hated laws on the books of the United States is the Gun Free School Zone Act (GFSZA). This law makes it a federal felony to carry a firearm within 1,000 feet of the edge of a school (K-12) property. It is nearly impossible to live in a suburban area, and literally impossible to live in an urban area without encroaching upon these federally defined "school zones." Almost every otherwise-legal gun carrier is guilty of violating this law at one time or another - even off-duty police officers! The law does provide an exemption for those who hold a state-issued "license to carry" a firearm. I personally believe that Virginia's Concealed Handgun Permit does not meet the "letter" of the requirement to be an exemption, although I'm fairly certain that the feds would not want you to think so.
I have often wondered how in the world did we, the gun rights crowd, ever let this law pass and make it into the books. It's a virtual hammer that the feds hold over nearly every gun owner in the country, and while they choose to not enforce it frequently, it's still there, and it still influences the actions of people just the way the gun grabbers wanted it to.
Fast forward to now. Today. We are faced with S. 649, the falsely named "Safe Communities, Safe Schools Act of 2013". The gun grabbers are shouting their lies as loud and often as they can in the effort to convince the people that Universal Background Checks are widely supported. When you ask the questions in the right way, "the people" will support anything you want them to.
Just like the GFSZA, these new background checks will turn virtually every gun owner in America into a federal felon. We let them impose the GFSZA upon us, we MUST stop this one.
Even after you learn what it does, people will certainly say, that's so ridiculous, they would never prosecute you for that! That's exactly what they say about the GFSZA, and that is the evil genius of these kinds of laws. By never enforcing them, they never make it in front of a judge to be thrown out. But by putting them on the books they do still influence the behavior of law-abiding citizens... and that is their ultimate goal!
Please read this excellent article that outlines the common, every-day activities that nearly all gun owners do at some point in their lives...activities which will make you a federal felon, if this bill becomes law.
We lost the GFSZA battle. We cannot lose this one!
TFred
Excerpts from the above-linked article:
To see how the Bloomberg bill makes felons of people who do not sell guns, consider a woman who buys a rifle when she is 25 years old. She keeps the rifle her entire life. Yet over her lifetime, she — like most gun owners — engages in dozens of firearms “transfers.” She brings the unloaded rifle to a friend’s house, for instance, because the friend is thinking of buying a gun and wants to learn more about guns. The friend handles the rifle for a few minutes before handing it back. Another time, the woman lends the gun to her niece, who takes it on a camping trip for the weekend.
While the woman is out of town on a business trip for two weeks, she gives the gun to her husband or her sister. If the woman lives on a farm, she allows all her relatives to take the rifle into the fields for pest and predator control — and sometimes, when friends are visiting, she takes them to a safe place on the farm where they spend an hour or two target shooting, passing her gun back and forth. At other times, she and her friends go target shooting in open spaces of land owned by the National Forest Service or the Bureau of Land Management.
Or perhaps the woman is in a same-sex civil union, and she allows her partner to take her gun to a target range one afternoon. Another time, she allows her cousin to borrow the gun for an afternoon of target shooting. If the woman is in the Army Reserve and she is called up for an overseas deployment, she gives the gun to her sister for temporary safekeeping.
One time, she learns that her neighbor is being threatened by an abusive ex-boyfriend, and she lets this woman borrow a gun for several days until she can buy her own gun. And if the woman becomes a firearms-safety instructor, she regularly teaches classes at office parks, in school buildings at nights and on weekends, at gun stores, and so on. Following the standard curriculum of gun-safety classes (such as NRA safety courses), the woman will bring some unloaded guns to the classroom, and under her supervision, students will learn the first steps in how to handle the guns, including how to load and unload them (using dummy ammunition). During the class, the firearms will be “transferred” dozens of times, since students must practice how to hand a gun to someone else safely. As a Boy Scout den mother or 4-H leader, the woman may also transfer her gun to young people dozens of times while instructing them in gun safety.
Under S. 649, every one of the above activities would be a federal felony, subject to precisely the same punishment a person would receive if he had knowingly sold a firearm to a convicted violent felon. S. 649, like other Bloomberg-model bills, has a few exceptions to the ban on transfers, but none of them apply to the situations described above.