« Big mess with seized guns in Mass. | Main | Defunding trigger lock sales requirement »

A modest proposal to end the straw man issue

I suppose I'm dating myself here, but I once obtained, via FOIA, ATFE records showing that back in the early 70s an agent had recommended adding a box to the 4473 asking "are you buying this gun for someone else?" The proposal was turned down because it might impede making cases! They loved straw man cases, and this might just end a lot of them. Then in the 1990s, I think, the agency did add a box to the 4473 along those lines.

Here's my proposal. It's simple. The straw man problem is logically insoluable. As the 4473 notes, you can buy a gun as a gift for someone else, but can't buy it "for" someone else. How do you draw the line between the two?

Simple solution: the problem arises because the 4473 only has one blank for the buyer. You can title a car or a house to two, three, however many people, but you can't title a gun, as it were, to anything but one person.

Create, oh, a 4473A form that has *two* blanks for the buyer. If a person tells the dealer that they want to buy a gun for someone else, then both people fill in the blanks, and both get a background check run. You can fine tune the procedure in a couple of areas. First, buying for an underage person -- it's allowed, even tho the underaged person cannot buy from a dealer directly -- so tune the form for that. Second, might want to make provision for a situation where the other person isn't physically at the dealer's premises at the time.

· Gun Control Act of 68