If Obama actually does issue some EO related to guns, it would likely be limited to administrative rule-making to federal seller laws. I don’t think he could for instance issue an EO expanding background checks to private sales. That would almost certainly be nullified by the courts as out of his purview. However, one thing he probably *could* do, is change the FFL licensing rules to require licensed sellers to move to electronic reporting of the 4473 forms. Make them type the information into a web portal. And here’s the kicker: contract with a private sector company to maintain the database for the feds. This will circumvent the rule about the fed not maintaining a gun registry, because they *won’t* be maintaining one.
Rules pertaining to agency requirements for various federal licenses wouldn’t normally be expected to have to be approved by Congress. And since ATF and FBI are directly under the President’s purview, he could simply order the Directors to make the new rule by presidential order. San Bernadino makes this the perfect time to do it too, as that event goes directly to guns and counter-terrorism.
Advantages of electronic 4473 database:
- LEO use, obviously. This would drastically speed up the process of determining where a criminal got his gun. Plus, the feds can make the database available to any state that wants it too. There are plenty of state and local LEO out there who would dearly love to have this as a tool available for their criminal investigations, but they are in states which have been locked up by the gun lobby and can’t do this.
- Gun industry sales data: By maker, by class, by everything. Tired of scrounging around the webs for gun sales figures? Ever wondered how in the hell an industry that makes a product this lethal can seemingly get away with just shipping stuff around wherever, without anybody really knowing how much of it they’re pouring into society? With the database, we’d know all the time, every time, exactly how many handguns, AR15s, how much ammo, the works.
- Buyer Demographic info: by gender, by age, by recent arrest, by military service, by whatever. And of course, number of guns purchased. This would massively improve ability to identify gun flippers and, critically, calculate how many of their secondary purchases end up as recovered crime guns. This data alone would pretty much drive a wooden stake through the heart of any opposition to UBC. At the very least it would support a proposal to tighten up the federal statute on private sales by adding an actual max number of guns per time period an individual can sell. As it stands now, in most states it would be nearly impossible to identify gun flippers who were simply ignoring a newly imposed max buy limit. But with the database, you’ve got it right there and you could actually have the database automatically forward this info to NICS when a person hits their limit.
- Example Database Query: How many former combat vets from age 20-30 in the last year have: (1) been charged with a misdemeanor, (2) moved from a high-population zip code to a low population zip code, and (3) purchased an assault rifle? That might be an interesting demographic to watch, wouldn’t you think?
- FFL activity: Watch what they sell and when. Having this information on FFLs would also make a strong argument for asking for the other half, which would be the shipped order counts from the makers. Match these two up, subtract, and you’ve got *actual* FFL inventory. That is, before however many guns per month mysteriously “got lost” somewhere in the back room. This information together would be able to quickly identify misbehaving FFLs and shut them down.
- Counter-terrorism. Intel agencies can query database with names of real-life terror suspects and individuals supporting them. Look for patterns of movement, track locations of terror cells.
macdavisethic 
Yep, does not sound like you libs have any intentions of taking our guns……
Gotta go …. my cnc machine is about done with another batch ….. list free
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This objection rests on a false assumption that all people who are prohibited from owning guns, but seek them anyway, fall under the category of career criminal who will stop at nothing to obtain a gun. Those exist, certainly, but there’s a sizable chunk of them who will simply be people who did a bad thing, hit their girlfriend, got a third DUI, whatever, and now can’t own. But they still want a gun just for home protection and they figure the odds of them getting caught are very low, so they surf over to Armslist, drive 5 minutes to meet a buyer, and easily come home with their gun that nobody knows they now have.
This type of prohibited buyer is not a career criminal, and he doesn’t have the criminal contacts that would be needed to obtain a gun illegally if all gun sales were required to include a background check. But luckily for our girlfriend-abuser here, the laws allowed his Armslist seller to sell him a gun with no questions asked, with no more effort than it would take to run out and meet up a Craigslist person selling a used clock radio. If UBC passed, and you’re correct and criminals began fabricating them themselves en masse, well that would be an issue. But it still wouldn’t help the girlfriend-abuser, because he has no way to find these criminal gun makers and buy their wares. And they can’t exactly advertise their illegal guns on the internet, so it’s unlikely the two will be able to do business. It’s more likely he’ll just give up and accept his legally imposed non-gun owner status.
So while it might be true that a dedicated career criminal will still find a way around an expanded background check requirement that covers all sales, if the new law only prevented the more casual law-breaker from obtaining, that should still be a perfectly acceptable ratio between minor inconvenience to gun owners vs. societal benefit to everybody else to favor passing the new law.
At this point it is often demanded by Pro Gun that Pro Reg produce initial calculations that make a claim as to exactly how much of the illegal selling activity UBC will prevent. The answer: don’t know, and don’t need to know. For the same reason that we don’t need to know exactly how much more theft and murder would occur if we decided to stop punishing those activities. It’s anybody’s guess, but we’re all agreed that it would be quite a bit, so that alone is a very good reason to continue to punish theft and murder.
But let’s say you’re not satisfied with this, and you press on with your objection just based on your assertion that career criminals will simply begin fabrication their own guns. A CNC machine that can do this is going to start around $3,000. But if you have $3,000, then you probably don’t need to rob gas stations. And heck, if you’ve got money for the shop and machine, and the skills to use it, then you can walk into a machine shop right now and get hired making good money, which is preferable to robbing and killing anyway.
“Ok, so every petty criminal won’t make his own guns. But a few will, and they’ll supply all the other criminals and make lots of money.”
No, that’s very unlikely. First of all, yeah, I’d be willing to bet that somewhere this will occur, and some enterprising criminal with set up shop to supply his gang. But this sort of thing is pretty top-limited as to how many people can be in on it, because it will quickly get discovered, just like meth labs and crack houses.
But the more important factor here is that of advertising. If you’re criminal CNC gun factory guy, how do you advertise your wares? How do you find customers? And come to think of it, since you can make more money the scarcer something is, why aren’t there illegal CNC gun shops all over the UK? The economic incentive to make and sell illegal guns would be even higher over there, since they have a virtual ban on all civilian gun ownership. And yet, in all the UK, they average about 40 gun murders per year. Compared to our 12,000. And they have plenty of CNC machines and career criminals over there too. So apparently it is by no means inevitable that the black market will simply abhor a vacuum and rush in when stricter laws are passed that reduce gun availability for criminals.
Lastly, even if somehow all of this fails and black market CNC guns do somehow get distributed to all the prohibited buyers seeking them, all you have to do then is simply choke off the ammunition supply. Guns are getting easier and easier to make with the new fabbing technologies, but it is not possible to make your own reliable cased ammunition in quantity from raw materials. So if criminals start making their own guns, we just take away the ammo.
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