Reply #1

"Wisconsin Sen. Lena Taylor said, “The shooting highlights the need for better law enforcement that require restraining order recipients to surrender their weapons.”

Currently, according to a Legislative Reference Bureau analysis, the law mandates perpetrators of domestic abuse, child abuse and harassment are not able to possess any firearms. People who have caused some type of harm to others are also not allowed to have firearms."

In principle, I don't have much of a problem with people who have restraining orders issued against them having to give up their guns.

There is one issue I foresee, however - revenge restraining orders being filed by a partner who wants to force the other partner to have to divest themselves of their firearm property.

But I don't see how it can work anyway:

"However, the new law may not have helped even if it were in place before the shooting at the Brookfield spa, where Radcliffe Haughton opened fire at the spa where his wife worked Oct. 21. They were going through a divorce, and three days prior to the shooting, she had issued a restraining order against him.

According to the Associated Press, he was asked to surrender any weapons he may have had before the shooting, although it is unclear whether he turned any in or not."

As long as we have anonymous firearm ownership, and we must, then the government will never know how many firearms a person owns to confiscate them, which, of course, is the whole idea behind anonymous firearm ownership. So they will have no way of knowing how many firearms, if any, to confiscate from someone under a restraining order.

I have heard many firearm owners over the years advocating keeping a junk gun that can be turned in in case of government confiscation efforts, so that you can be seen as complying.

Of course, the article has some other obvious bias problems:

"The day prior to the shooting, Haughton went out and purchased a .40 caliber semi-automatic handgun from a private dealer, according to police in Brown Deer, a suburb of Milwaukee where Haughton lived.

The seller did nothing illegal — individuals aren’t required to conduct background checks or enforce a 48-hour waiting period as licensed gun dealers are under state law."

Note the wording here "a private dealer". Then they come back and clarify this as "individuals".

Then there is this slip:

"Even if Haughton had given up all his firearms, he could have just as easily bought a gun from a private seller within the hour.

However, if laws on selling guns privately were beefed up, it could require individuals to do a background check on perspective buyers, which might cripple the private selling practice in Wisconsin."

And now you can see the true agenda here.

As I've said before, a simple way to handle this problem is to use an opt-out licensing system. Then any private seller will simply record the buyer's FOID information.