https://gregladen.com/blog/2017/10/vote-down-the-guns/

THANKS

…so I would think if we were going to do a registration system in the USA, it would be for all firearms. Handguns, rifles and shotguns.

What a good idea.

Whether this would pass in Congress is a different question…

If it failed then Congress should be fired (‘scuse pun).

The NRA is a truly nasty organisation that needs its wings clipped and fast, Hocus-POTUS Trump or not.

If you still cannot grasp the essentials here RickA, which is that the Second Amendment as it stands should not be inviolate, then you need go out and shop for a moral compass and a logic finder.

I see your point of view. But it wasn’t handguns which were the problem in Las Vegas or Sandy Hook – so I would think if we were going to do a registration system in the USA, it would be for all firearms. Handguns, rifles and shotguns.

Whether this would pass in Congress is a different question. But it would probably be found constitutional.

A gun registration law would probably be constitutional (i.e. not violate the 2nd amendment). Having to report what guns you have doesn’t really infringe your right to keep and bear arms.

The gun safe angle may not be quite so easy. The Heller decision law at issue had a whole lot of restrictions on how the weapon was supposed to be kept in the house, trigger lock, ammo in a separate room, etc. and it was struck down on the grounds that if it takes you a long time to get the weapon and use it for self-defense it does infringe your right to “keep and bear arms”. On the other hand, you can buy a bio-metric gun safe now which you can open with a fingerprint or hand print and keep a loaded weapon close at hand – but locked up – so maybe a carefully crafted law would pass muster.

If we pass a gun registration law, it would have to include rifles, especially semi-automatic rifles – don’t you think? Especially after Las Vegas.

When you place restrictions (legal ones) on buying things, yes, the less risk-averse will buy them. That’s the whole point. The number of people willing to go and shoot a large number of other people is rather small. If you make it that much harder for those people to get military-grade weapons whose sole purpose is to kill lots of other people very fast then the odds of any one of them doing it go down. Simple economics, as you say.

Also, “They will just drive a truck into a crowd” –well, you can murder anyone with just about anything. But there is a reason we do not have an epidemic of truck-murders (accidents are another matter entirely). It’s actually kind of hard to do it.

The same is true of knives and hand weapons. Killing someone via stabbing is hard. Using a sai is hard. Using a sword. To be an efficient killer with any of those means a lot of training hours. And you can only kill one person at a time.

Guns make killing easy, even accidental. Restricting people from buying them without proper training (in the specific weapon, by the way) and licensing, with renewals every so often, and insurance, would be a minimal move to reducing deaths. It’s no different than what we ask of auto owners.

I’d also be for asking people who want to carry guns do so openly. After all, if the point is to protect yourself, then carrying one openly would deter attackers. But that isn’t why people want to carry concealed weapons, then, if self-protection is the goal.

A huge part of the problem is people think guns work like they do in the movies, and that firefights look like they do in the movies. They don’t . In the confusion of hearing shots with sound bouncing off concrete you’d not be able to pinpoint the attacker’s location and pick him off (just ask any soldier who has been in an ambush). Also, machine gun bullets can go through a concrete cinder block, they don’t bounce nicely off the walls (in fact they generate craters and send hard fragments flying).

It’s a lot of Charles Bronson fantasists out there, and they go out armed, with weapons for which they are ill trained.

Yes, the guns really do matter.