In the wake of the Las Vegas massacre, where a Nevada-based shooter took the lives of 59 people and injured over 500, gun critics and supporters across the country have grabbed their mics and geared up for another round of gun control debates.
According to local law enforcement, the attacker had purchased over 33 guns in the past 12 months.
He also used what’s known as a ‘bump stock’, a legal gadget which can turn any semiautomatic gun into fully automatic. A device which, after the shooting, the National Rifle Association (NRA) said should be more tightly regulated.
“The N.R.A. believes that devices deisgned to allow semiautomatic rifles to function like fully-automatic rifles should be subject ot additional regulations,” the association said in a statement.
Now federal law is brought into question, on whether such gadgets should be regulated, and if excessive weapon purchases should be recorded.
Modifying the gun
But neither a gun registration system or a gadget ban would have been able to prevent something like this from happening, according to Jerry Henry, Executive Director of GeorgiaCarry.org, a state-wide gun rights and advocacy organization.
“There’d be other ways to do it,” Henry said on banning bump stocks. “If someone has in their mind, in this country, that they want to kill 50 to 60 people, they will find a way to do it.”
But Georgia State University Police Department (GSUPD) Chief Joseph Spillane keeping the gadgets legal — or finding a DIY way to automatize the gun — violates federal law.
“That [bump stocks] should not be legal at all,” Spillane said. “There are DIY ways, but all those ways are illegal. If you modify a weapon to make it an automatic weapon, you’re violating federal law.” And, he said, the gadgets come at a cost, as they require a higher capacity of bullets, and shoot them out much quicker, making the gun way more expensive. “I’d be stupid to put one on my weapon.”
‘Nobody’s Business’
And as far as registration goes, Henry said there should be no such thing, because simply, it’s nobody’s business.
National registration would allow the government to keep track of how many guns each person owns, and put up a red flag, when someone has gone beyond a certain limit. Both Henry and Spillane said that would not be a good idea.
“If in Nazi Germany they had a gun registry, the first thing they’d do is round up the people who’d resist,” he said.
Spillane said, the second amendment was built to keep up with a tyranist government, so that in times of dictatorship, the people would would have the ability to defend and protect themselves.
“Gun prohibitionists would like to see a national registration. We wouldn’t. That’s what Hitler did before he took over,” Henry said. “Is it anybody’s business how many cars your own or how many kitches knives you own? I know people that have more than 30 guns in their house, it’s not the firearms. They have nothing to do with it. People collect guns all the time, for various reasons.”
And not just handguns, high-capacity magazines — which Henry calls normal-capacity — are popular among gun enthusiasts and not just because they’re fun.
“If you’ve never shot one, I can understand your feelings. But it is fun to shoot those guns.”
But having a gun that could shoot out a hundred bullets in seconds is also a matter of safety for Henry.
“If I’m being attacked, and someone has 101 rounds, I need to protect myself. You won’t find anyone who has been in a gun fight that will tell you ‘I just had too many bullets.’ If you’re going to protect yourself, you need the right to protect yourself in all conditions,” Henry said.
A gun would not have helped in the Las Vegas shooting however, Henry said, because the concert was at a gun-free zone. Without guns for defense, and gun registration or regulation for legal gadgets, even Henry agreed there was no way to prevent the massacre.
“A gun has got no violence in it,” he said, adding mental illness is to blame in cases like this one. You won’t know when “one day somebody wakes up mentally ill.”
“You can’t see what’s inside a man or a woman, you cant’ tell what’s inside a person’s heart, and you never know what’s in their mind.”
And not even background checks can help with that, as, even if they check an individual’s records and history, GSUPD Chief Spillane said it’s never all there.
Five-year limit for mental illness
“The only thing a background [check] will tell you is that this person has not engaged in behaviour that has been identified and prosecuted by courts,” Spillane said. “It means we haven’t identified him as a criminal yet.”
According to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI), background checks include an individual’s identifying information (like name, date of birth, race, etc), arrests data, and final judicial disposition. Background checks do not include juvenile (defendant was prosecuted before the age of 16), restricted and sealed records are not released. Restricted records can be any records not released by a criminal justice agency — except to possible employers. Finally, if a defendant has entered a first offender (FOA) sentence before entering a plea, and successfully comleted probation terms and FOA requirements, charges and case would be sealed, as per Georgia law.
All that would not be included in a background check.
Furthermore, mental illnesses are not included in those records, unless an individual has been officially diagnosed. Even if a person knowingly suffers from mental instabilities, there will be no traces of such on their record, and they will be free to purchase any weapon legal in Georgia.
But there’s an even bigger state-wide dillema. Even if someone in Georgia had been diagnosed with a mental illness, any trace of it would be wiped from the National Instant Background Check System after five years.
That means that anyone who might have been diagnosed with a condition, would be legally able to purchase a gun, once the state had wiped it from their record.
“That’s a legal dilemma (because) that person is still prohibited from possession or buying firearms,” GBI Director Vernon Keenan had told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2015.
