OPPOSE Rep. Michael Paymar's hidden gun registration bill!

Protect Minnesota and Citizens for a Safer Minnesota’s “Gun Show Background Check (and hidden Gun Registration) bill,” expected to be authored by Rep. Michael Paymar, is pure harassment of legitimate gun owners and their non-commercial disposition of their property because, as a 2008 empirical study by university Criminologists demonstrates , it will have NO EFFECT on homicides or suicides and provide NO REDUCTION in firearm-related deaths (or violent crime, for that matter). All it will do is impose unnecessary deprivation of liberty, hassle, delay, and cost on Minnesota’s 1.5 million legitimate gun owners.

GOCRA encourages you to OPPOSE this bill.

1. A January 2009 Star-Tribune article says that the Twin Cities’ homicide problem is largely one of uncontrolled gang/drug activity. Anyone who can sell or purchase illegal drugs can acquire a gun in that illegal transaction. An FBI report in February 2009 identifies “weapons trafficking” as a major GANG activity. Don’t be fooled, these are black market transactions; not those of legitimate gun owners.

2. The legitimate market (consisting of licensed dealers and private citizens) is not the same thing as the "black market" (consisting of thieves, "fences," and "accomplices"). There are two distinct markets with different actors! In a Business Week column, Professor Gary Becker the Nobel Prize winner in Economics stated:
[t]here are two almost discrete markets for weapons. The legitimate market caters to people who want guns for hunting and for protection against holdups and burglaries. The [black] market caters to criminals who want weapons to help them steal, intimidate, rape, participate in gang warfare, and steal drugs.
Becker goes on to note that controls on the legitimate sellers cannot have effect on an underground market that ignores those controls. CANNOT have any effect!!!

3. According to the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms less than 1 in 50 guns acquired by criminals come from gun shows or private resales. And virtually all of that tiny number comes from “strawman purchases” made by accomplices who CAN pass any background check (as the Va. Tach and NIU killers both DID).

4. Minnesota statutes already contain FOUR (4) provisions to cut off “black market” transfers. They are: (1) 609.52 – Theft by the criminal himself, (2) 609; (2) 609.53 – Theft-once-removed by acquisition from a “fence;” (3) 609.66 sibd. 1c – Receipt from an accomplice/strawman; and (4) 624.7141 – Transfer to an ineligible person.

5. The bill targets the wrong people and won’t reduce murder or crime.
It is simply a harassment bill to vex millions of law-abiding Minnesota gun owners. Perhaps that is why the Minnesota gun control act has never included these citizens and why the federal "Brady" Bill doesn't either!