Belmont the NRA is perhaps the most powerful organization in the US. When you buy a firearm from a gun shop, most times they give you an application to join the NRA or you are automatically enrolled into the NRA. They have fought gun laws for so long, that they have thrown common sense out the window sometimes.
What this bill that the president pushed for, is that a law abiding citizen can no longer do a private sell of a firearm, they either have to have a license to do that or have a licensed dealer to do the transaction. This is not really going to help with the gun violence, cause there will always be a black market for guns. You also have people out there that can assemble and craft firearms such as AK-47s and Uzis to give you a sense of what can be build with no serial numbers. In high school I made a few zip guns, single shot .22 and .25 calibers.
The ATF can only do so much, and are plagued by embarrassments over the years. They have tried to enforce the 48 hours of reporting a stolen or missing firearm of a citizen, but guess what? The good old NRA has made some of that difficult to do. What is one of the things the NRA keeps shouting all these years? The government is trying to control and take away peoples guns. The government is trying to regulate firearms, and with the recent gun violence, there really has not been any bipartisanship between the parties in this issue to where the President really had no choice but to push this new law.
Is this law going to fix the problem? No. What this law is is just something for certain people to be able to sleep comfortably at night thinking they solved the problem. The United States exports a lot of firearms to other nations. The US is a gun nation pure and simple, it's in our country's dna.
For the record you can legally own a flamethrower in the US, some states have city ordinance for that but it is something that is never brought up. The psychological and mentality of that is for more worst then that of firearms.
Ask yourselves this, how many people that own firearms have gun safes and gun locks? It is a question that is asked on a application, but rarely checked uponed.
The black-market for guns will thrive with this new law for years. It is just how it is. Supply and demand. There has to be a balance with the gun laws but there is none. Cities, farming towns, lumberjack towns, mining towns, ranching towns, and rural towns are all different, and have different threats to their communities.
That's my rant.