
Inside the Federal Bureau of Way Too Many Guns - Someone
http://www.gq.com/story/inside-federal-bureau-of-way-too-many-guns
======
Redoubts
> No, says the gun lobby. It would give the government a tool to confiscate
> our guns. The idea of a gun registry is the great fever dream that lies at
> the heart of gun-control conspiracy theories: Government evildoers are going
> to attack us any day now. We have to be ready. (And you don't give the enemy
> an inventory of all your weapons!)

I mean, I constantly see the concerns of gun owners derided like this, but
I've never seen a good reason why they shouldn't be scared of a national
registry. The debate has been purely adversarial for quite some time, so I'm
not sure why/how both sides should come together for a good-faith compromise.

~~~
splintercell
My rationale behind not supporting any compromise is simple: the other side
does not want me to have any guns.

Imagine if the most anti-gun position in America was still very pro-gun people
like say Charleton Heston, then I'd be willing for a compromise. I would be ok
with building a registry where the police can search for guns.

But the fact is, we know that Hillary Clinton talks about how Australia
successfully got rid of all its guns. We know that the ultimate goal isn't a
happy compromise in the middle.

This is why the 'cold dead hands' mentality exists in America.

It's like imagine if Republicans want a national registry of people by their
religion. Or national ethnicity database. The Democrats wouldn't (and
shouldn't) give an inch on that.

~~~
karmacondon
Insane. No politician is calling for a complete elimination of guns. That idea
has never been proposed or discussed seriously in any way. I don't think even
the fringe of the anti-gun lobby wants to get rid of all guns.

This is probably one of the most successful strawmen in all of US politics. I
don't think anyone on either side actually believes that the government would
ever try to confiscate all guns

~~~
splintercell
> Insane. No politician is calling for a complete elimination of guns. That
> idea has never been proposed or discussed seriously in any way. I don't
> think even the fringe of the anti-gun lobby wants to get rid of all guns.

Are you serious? I can't determine if you're being sarcastic or not.

Sure the idea has never been formally proposed, because no politician will
ever get elected in America if they proposed such idea.

But here's Hillary Clinton for you:

> I do not know enough detail to tell you how we would do it, or how it would
> work, but certainly the Australian example is worth looking at.<

Now you may say that Hillary Clinton didn't mean gun confiscation by
'Australian example', but it's clear she clearly isn't appalled by Australian
gun confiscation.

Why Australian example? Why not Canadian example? Why not French example? Sure
maybe this is not a strong correlation.

But then Democrats get caught all the time talking about complete elimination
of guns when they think they are not on Camera:

[http://dailycaller.com/2015/12/01/maryland-deputy-ag-
reveals...](http://dailycaller.com/2015/12/01/maryland-deputy-ag-reveals-
secrets-in-hotel-meetings-with-undercover-okeefe-reporter-video/)

Matt Damon openly supports Australia styles gun confiscation:

[http://insider.foxnews.com/2016/07/06/matt-damon-mass-gun-
co...](http://insider.foxnews.com/2016/07/06/matt-damon-mass-gun-confiscation-
needed-us-australia)

I'm sorry, but I don't believe that the ideal vision of America gun control
proponents have is to have no civilian ownership of guns.

~~~
shalmanese
Australia hasn't eliminated all guns. In fact, the number of guns owned
legally by Australians now exceeds the number pre-Port Arthur.

------
lwhalen
Good. The gov't has no more a right to track my guns as they do my book
purchases. "Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms" should be a convenience store, not
a gov't agency.

~~~
pjc50
But you're OK with the car registration system? And the cell phone IMEI
database? And the no-fly list?

Edit: I should have been more general with the "you". Only the opposition to
the gun database has succeeded. There's no general conversation about privacy;
there's no coalition of pro-privacy orgs with a consistent view on what should
and should not be stored in databases. Why is this?

~~~
DamnYuppie
As someone who agrees with the OP I am definitely not a fan of the no-fly list
and other centralized registration databases.

------
intended
Charlie is now my hero, he applied queuing theory to improve time take to
identify guns.

That's the right kind of person (comp sci and Intelligence background), using
science to deal with a kafkaesque situation (no computers allowed) and
managing to improve outcomes.

~~~
jasonjei
I loved reading how they optimized the search problem. Charlie has CS
education, the way they sorted their tuples and organized their data (as long
as it's not by name!) reduced query times. Ironically, a CS education can help
you optimize those processes even where computers are not allowed.

~~~
HarryHirsch
What's ironic about this? Computer Science is the study of algorithms, not the
study of whatever language is _en vogue_ today. For the latter, you attend
Coding Bootcamp.

~~~
jasonjei
CS is not necessarily just the study of algorithms. I have a formal CS
education and it encompasses everything from circuit design to algorithms to
data structures to operating systems to statistics and graph, number and
decision theory. Algorithms is a subset of overall theory that is a component
of Computer Science and Maths.

But I do agree, they've implemented some sort of hashing, with several buckets
and trees to search from. It may not be efficient compared to actual computer
databases, but it's the best humans can do with O(log n). Space requirement is
still unfortunately O(n) but hopefully PDFs will help the ATF guys.

If anything I'm saying that I'm happy people are recognizing that Computer
Science has applications outside of computers, and is practically Applied
Maths. A bachelor's degree in CS is only 2-3 math courses away from a minor in
Maths.

The irony is that a computer scientist is helpful in a computer-less
environment. I guess you could say the human mind is a very advanced computer.
It may not seem ironic to everyone on HN, but to the layman, what on earth
could a CS person do with no computers? And the answer is a lot. After all
Djikstra handwrote his algorithms on paper.

------
HarryHirsch
The encouraging thing is this: there is a strong sentiment in the US that the
government should not track firearm purchases, there are laws in place to that
effect, and consequently it is very difficult to track down the owner of a
registered gun. The political process works!

Now, if we just could de-fang Google, Facebook, the advertising networks that
track users across websites and all the other data aggregators!

~~~
onetwotree
The obvious difference is that the gun industry is opposed to making it easy
to track down guns. There are no powerful financial interests fighting for our
data privacy.

~~~
splintercell
Home come gun industries in other countries fought against gun laws? Maybe
it's something to do with the fact that Gun lobby is powerful because we're a
huge gun owning country with a constitutionally defined right to keep and bear
arms.

People don't become alcoholic because powerful beer industry spent money on
preventing laws against alcohol.

~~~
onetwotree
> People don't become alcoholic

Perhaps you're right, and we need to treat our countries addiction to guns
instead of trying to reduce the supply.

~~~
splintercell
> Perhaps you're right, and we need to treat our countries addiction to guns
> instead of trying to reduce the supply.

There's no 'addiction' to Gun. I am an immigrant myself, and before coming to
America I was anti-gun. Now, I am not scare of guns anymore and consider it to
be a great social good.

------
carsongross
The reality is that this is putting the very people whom guns are supposed to
protect us against in charge of their regulation. The second amendment is
there not for hunting or sporting, but rather to maintain a state militia,
literally a state-level military:

 _A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,
the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed._

You can see this underlying (and, to many modern folks, uncomfortable) reality
being admitted to implicitly when they go after long guns first, despite the
fact that long guns account for a vanishingly small amount of total gun crime.
Long guns _are_ excellent for challenging an overreaching central government,
however.

~~~
kabdib
Registries in the US have very poor compliance rates; under 5% for a rifle
registry in CA in the 1990s (the Atty General called the registry "a
failure"), and a similar rate for a more recent attempt to register long guns
in Connecticut.

The government can run through the physical paperwork (held by dealers), but
it's slow, inaccurate and inefficient. Many people think that is a feature.

[The funny thing about "assault weapon" bans is that of two firearms that are
_functionally identical_ , one will be banned because it merely looks evil --
black and creepy looking -- while the other will be explicitly allowed in
legislation. It's political posturing that just creates more criminals and
does nothing to address the underlying causes of violence, namely failed
socio-economic policies and the war on drugs, which creates a nice, solid
economic base for gangs].

------
Someone
_" He has to have the files printed out, and then the ladies take pictures of
them and store them that way. Anything that allows people to search by name is
verboten."_

If that is the only issue, I would construct a database that maps (gun type,
serial number) to physical location ((microfiche, page, row) or (binder, page,
row)). That should speed up look ups by (gun type, serial number)
tremendously, but still would require one to go through all physical data to
search by name.

~~~
pjc50
> I would construct a database

.. and that's how you get thousands of armed protestors demanding that your
organisation be shut down and your records destroyed. It doesn't matter what
the proposed contents of the database are. The politics is extremely volatile
and not very rational.

(Even the IRA were finally persuaded to put their weapons "permanently beyond
use", in the language of the peace agreement.)

~~~
DamnYuppie
Yes it is very political, but I disagree that it isn't rational. The stance is
that registration leads to confiscation. This has been proven time and time
again. And no we don't want to be like some countries that have registrations
and you have to store your weapons in some offsite facility and can only
access them for certain times of the year with approved ammunition.

~~~
pjc50
Oh, I'll agree that the ratchet is real and that every proposal is intended to
reduce and de-normalise gun ownership. In that sense, I can see why every
single measure is opposed. It's the non-hunting rationales for ownership that
are the irrational politics.

~~~
douche
It seems to be having the opposite effect. Every time there is a threat to
institute new legislation, gun sales go through the roof.

~~~
wolf550e
it certainly looks like the gun control lobby and gun manufacturers lobby are
in symbiosis.

~~~
hga
Heh, something like the Baptist and Bootlegger's alliance?

From someone who's been in this fight since the early '70s, nope, the gun
manufacturers' lobby, the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF,
[http://nssf.org/](http://nssf.org/)), is a very small political player.

The gun _owners_ lobby, especially the NRA, yes, the appearance of symbiosis
is to a great extent true, but that took decades to achieve, not until the
1977 Cincinnati Revolt, and it wasn't until the 1994 "assault weapons" ban
that a Federal gun control law was passed without the NRA's blessing.

We're much bigger, gun and ammo manufacturing isn't a very big industry as
these things go. 5 million people in the NRA, at least half the people in the
US (last survey, 45% willing to admit to it)? Much larger.

------
fredgrott
I got a stupid question from a stupid American(me):

What would happen if ammo was taxed the same way cigarettes are in the USA?

An example, someone buys a semi-automatic gun or automatic weapon...well than
the ammo is taxed at a modest 5000%.

You can have the guns all you want..but if you want to use them you pay the
right cost to the degree of dangerous of the gun weapon...ie automatic ammo is
taxed higher than say shotgun shells.

State, both local, US states and federal would be exempt from the ammo tax.

~~~
douche
Reloading would become an even bigger deal than it already is. Already,
anybody that shoots seriously and goes through a lot of ammunition will
usually get setup with reloading equipment, because buying the powder, primers
and bullets, with reused brass, is at least half as expensive as buying new
ammunition.

Also, there isn't a meaningful distinction between ammunition used in semi-
automatic vs other types. 9mm is 9mm is 9mm, whether you're shooting it out of
a Glock or a revolver or a single-shot target pistol. Same thing with rifle
ammunition - NATO 5.56x45 tends to be what a lot of AR-15 variants, the so-
called "assault weapons" are chambered in, but there's no reason you couldn't
also have a bolt-action hunting rifle in the same caliber.

~~~
hga
5.56 NATO was derived from the .223 Remington cartridge developed for the
original AR-15, which was derived from the .222 Remington varmint cartridge
and intended to be between it and the .222 Remington Magnum.

My father's primary hunting partner when I started hunting had a .222 bolt
action rifle; if this had happened later, it would undoubtedly be a .223 due
to the reduced costs of the 5.56/.223 ecosystem.

~~~
douche
It can be incredibly frustrating to find slightly odd-ball calibers like that.
My father has a couple of old lever action deer rifles that he's inherited,
and they can be lots of fun to track down ammunition for, since some are
larger caliber rimfires that are virtually extinct, and the rest are tend to
be odd flat-nosed Winchester cartridges, to accommodate the tubular feeds.

~~~
hga
What's the larger caliber rimfires? I've only read about them, and from what
I've heard in passing about the dangerousness of making rimfire ammo (in
relation to one of the reasons US manufacturers aren't contemplating expanding
production), suggests you're out of luck there.

The classic centerfire flat-nosed Winchester cartridges, though, you can of
course reload them after getting some modern ammo for it (don't try this with
old mercury fulminate primed ammo, I read an article by someone who had an old
Browning police semi-auto carbine, he wrecked it because the mercury fatally
compromises the strength of the brass). My father has or had one of those, I
think it was from the era when you could buy one with the same ammo for your
handgun as your rifle, the action certainly wasn't very strong. Octagonal
barrel, a really neat piece of history.

Ah, and for those who aren't into this sort of thing, all the "calibers" I
mentioned in my above comment use bullets of the same width, it's a confusing
"system", if you can call it that, it grew organically.

------
Eric_WVGG
Would a "bot approach" to searching these records work?

Say you were looking for (to use the article's example) a 9-mm semi-automatic
Beretta 92 sold at Annie's Get Your Gun, serial number ABC123.

You have the scans of all the Form 4473s put into folders (or maybe not, maybe
just everything in a dump), and tell the bot to go looking for any form that
matches this pattern. Importantly, the bot would NOT cache or structure data
for later lookups; every search would be virgin.

You'd have a lot of false positives (the O 0 and I 1 problem), it would not be
terribly helpful at handwritten forms, but it could reduce a pile of a million
records down to, hopefully, a few hundred or thousand.

------
bjt2n3904
> "I've got this form in my hand here. I'm looking at the form. I can tell you
> for a fact right now the purchaser and possessor are the same person."

Seems that either the author doesn't understand how the 4473 works, or
Charlie. Most likely both. A Form 4473 defines the possessor of the firearm
like the IP address defines the user of the Internet connection.

~~~
greggyb
I read some into this and could certainly be wrong:

The possessor is determined by the gun being found by local law enforcement
finding an individual, A, in posession of the gun in question.

A trace request is submitted. The gun (in police custody after being found in
A's possession) is associated with a form 4473. That 4473 is found, and the
original purchaser is indicated to be A.

The quotes excerpted in this article seem to be missing a lot of context and
to have come from longer discussions that are noted to be emotional in many
cases. I am interpreting that quote as part of a longer conversation where the
speaker is jumping around a lot.

The whiteboard section clearly indicates that Charlie does not necessarily
express his thoughts linearly and in an easy-for-the-author-to-follow manner.

------
NKCSS
I guess it's me, but this while system and all those scared comments here of
people afraid to have the gov. Know which guns you have, completely baffel me.
I expected some smart individuals here, being able to recognise how weird this
whole attitude is, but I am sorely dissapointed.

~~~
hga
Smart is orthogonal to this issue, unless you consider it a synonym for wise
(and few young smart people are also wise, something that's been notes for
millennia).

Educated or knowledgeable is all you need, those who know about the history of
confiscations and often genocides following gun registration are _of course_
afraid to let the government know.

Or let me ask you, how do you know the government will stay as minimally
benevolent as it already is? Especially with it's trending not so benevolent
in the last few decades, as, for example, peace officers morphed into warrior
cops? The War on (Some) Drugs, anyone?? What else might dissuade you of this
notion you implicitly admit to?

Weird? Disappointed? We're out-grouped? Maybe so, but that doesn't mean we're
actually wrong, you know.

~~~
NKCSS
Maybe it's because I live in a country where I am not afraid of the government
and see the state of the US Vs. countries here in Europe where having a
firearm is prohibited; I just don't get it. It feels the same like telling a 3
year old it's not allowed to handle a chefs knife on their own, but it gets
mad because dad said it was OK, it will get mad if you take it way because
someone said it was OK before, even though it's not the smart thing to do or
in the best interest of the child.

~~~
hga
My god, according to your website and whois info, you're in the Netherlands.

As I relate in
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12425485](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12425485)
_in living memory_ , invaders have used your country's gun registration list
to confiscate all the people's firearms, with public execution of whole
families as a penalty for not producing a gun on the list.

Oh, and owning a firearm in Europe is most certainly not prohibited, and
that's not counting Switzerland, although the reported figures for the
Netherlands
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_guns_per_c...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_guns_per_capita_by_country)
look close to a total _de jure_ prohibition.

I guess the post-WWII ruling class was satisfied with what the Nazis wrought
on its people; you certainly are....

~~~
NKCSS
So, you're afraid of the 2nd (third?) coming of the third reich, that would
occupy the united states, andabuse a gun registration lis? It would seem you'd
have a whole slew of bigger problems...

------
dalke
What is the 1986 law which says "No searchable database of America's gun
owners"?

Does that mean the paper files can't be sorted alphabetically by name?

Does it exclude more complex paper-based search systems, like needle-sorted
edge-notched cards?

Or does it only refer to computer databases?

~~~
escapologybb
I wondered this, I'm not an American so the whole gun thing totally mystifies
me. I don't think anyone should be allowed to own a gun, not the government,
criminals, and certainly not people with mental illnesses. That being a
somewhat naive hope then I think restricting them as much as possible is the
thing to do.

However, I'm not an American so I wouldn't presume to tell you what to do with
your own country. You're welcome! /s

But at what point does it become a database and searchable, does he have to
deliberately pile up the boxes of receipts higgledy-piggledy lest they
accidentally fall into some sort of organised and therefore searchable order?
Seems crazily broad, no?

Edited to Add: Wow, form 4473 doesn't get sent to any kind of centralised
place until the gun shop that sold the particular con goes out of business. So
this to my mind means a family gun business this been open for 100 years has
every 4473 form they've ever written since the law came in, am I reading that
right? Surely that can't be right? As in not correct, I don't mean morally, I
mean that's just crazy to have a central database that doesn't centralise
regularly.

~~~
kabdib
Firearms have been nicknamed "equalizers" for a reason: An 80-year-old
grandmother can successfully hold off an assault by someone many times her
strength, size and agility. Get rid of guns and you now leave a large subset
of society defenseless.

Personally I think the 4473s should be destroyed after a reasonable time, and
never subject to bulk capture. It's no business of the government's what
purchases I make.

~~~
dalke
How many times has that "80-year-old grandmother" scenario happened?

In all those countries with stricter gun laws, how many more times are those
defenseless grandmothers been assaulted than in the US? I believe it's a
fraction, perhaps even a small fraction.

In the US, how many times has a child picked up a gun and killed someone by
accident? More times than grandmothers have defended themselves, or less?

How many times has a police officer shot someone for worries that the
officer's own life was in danger of being shot, only to find that the person
had no weapon?

How many times have SWAT and no-knock warrants been justified for worries that
the person being served might be armed? And of those, how many people have
died? And how many died when the police went to the wrong house?

How come having a gun didn't help Clarence Daniels keep from being assaulted
by Michael Foster? [http://www.motherjones.com/mixed-media/2015/01/black-man-
gun...](http://www.motherjones.com/mixed-media/2015/01/black-man-gun-permit-
walmart-florida-vigilante)

Regarding your last sentence, I think real estate titles have shown some of
the advantages to having the government track who has purchased a piece of
property, so I disagree with your blanket statement.

~~~
hga
_In the US, how many times has a child picked up a gun and killed someone by
accident? More times than grandmothers have defended themselves, or less?_

Easily less, there are only ~600 accidental firearms fatalities a year, and we
managed to get that number down from ~800 in 1980 in a period when both the
population and and the number of guns it owns have increased by very roughly
50%.

Those warrior cops you cite two examples of? We still had a huge gun owning
population back when they were peace officers, it's not guns per se that have
resulted in that change.

Real estate titles are a very different thing, I submit to you, in that trying
to take someone else's land has a much longer and greater pedigree than their
weapons, and for entirely different motives.

~~~
dalke
And how many grandmothers have successfully defended themselves with a weapon?
That's the missing side. (And yes, the numbers for that vary from 55,000 to
4.7 million total home defense use - good luck on narrowing it down to kabdib
scenario of 80 year old grandmothers.)

I believe the higher number includes grandmothers who defended herself with a
weapon without firing it, in which case the balance has to include all crimes
which were committed with a gun.

Really I'm annoyed with kabdib for using a hypothetical scenario to justify
personal gun ownership, when for decades everyone has pointed out how
meaningless such scenarios are for meaningful policy change.

I never said it was "guns per se". I'm well aware of countries like
Switzerland and Finland with a high gun ownership, though not as high as the
US, and don't have the same sorts of gun-related violence.

I agree that real estate and vehicle titles are different things. My point was
that I disagreed with the blanket statement "It's no business of the
government's what purchases I make."

------
Overtonwindow
Interesting article but I felt like the author put too much emphasis on making
a caricature of Charlie Houser. Starting from the first photo. It just set a
strange tone for the whole article.

