Acceptable New Gun Legislation

Require every firearm owner to pass a psychological examination regularly. No crazies should own firearms.

Require all household members of firearm owners to pass psychological examinations. Anyone failing disqualifies the household. No access for crazies to guns in their own household.

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Care to explain how either of these are Constitutional? We already know you cannot force someone to take a competency test for the right to vote. What makes you think other Constitutional rights are any different?

If your one of the 15 to vote to ban or accept new regulations on firearms you ought to be ashamed of yourselves.

wrong thread.

I would like to see some new gun control regulation.

I would like to see proper gun education and safety taught in our schools instead of treating firearms like a taboo subject.

I don't know all the details, but it might have got Adam Lanza's mother to think about having the weapons secured.

AKMtnRunner
Anti's, at least the ones in power voting on bills, are NOT just a bunch of well meaning misguided fools. You seem to be approaching them and this issue as if they are. It seems from your posts that you believe antis just have some wrong information about guns, some erroneous opinions about gun owners, and a lot of misplaced good intentions about keeping people safe. You seem to think that if we can just manage to teach them in the right way about guns, and take a few compromising steps in their direction, that they'll see us as friends and we can all move on with better understanding.

That's complete nonsense. They want control. They want the ability to make rules and force you to submit. If you're armed, you might fight back. They mean to be masters. They mean to dominate you. They know EXACTLY what they're doing. All of those regular-joe emotional "think of the children" antis that really are just misguided fools are only useful idiots to those in power. Don't even assume those in power don't mean to stay in power. And an armed country is a threat.


Gun control is and always has been about control. Once you understand that, I think you'll understand that playing this game by their rules is a very dangerous mistake.

Derek I agree with your entire post, but I want to give this a double thumbs up. Very well said.

The problem is that there are evil people in the world. If you want to be safe from them, then you need to either:
take the steps to protect yourself
Get the evil folks out of society once they're identified.
Your solutions limit the ability to do the former while failing to achieve the latter.

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I would like to see proper gun education and safety taught in our schools instead of treating firearms like a taboo subject.

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BBQLS1, that's what my more radical proposal was getting at. To turn this thing on its head and start thinking about how we can create gun laws to do as the founders intended and encourage safe firearm ownership and use. The whole process is fraught with risks, but then again the mantra of enforcing current laws has the downside of leaving us with the current laws, which are horrible and sometimes incomprehensible.

In the mass shootings in recent years, 90% of the killers were on some type of psychiatric meds. They are giving out psychoactive drugs to kids like it was candy, in schools today. When are we going to talk about THAT? Gun control doesn't make anyone safer. Lets do something that does.

I've done nothing but tried to offer ideas to deflect attacks on the 2nd Amendment.

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Come again? You've done nothing but offer the second amendment in a platter by offering compromises.

AKMtnRunner:
What is the purpose of the Second Amendment? Why did the Founding Fathers put it in the Bill of Rights?

but they offer no way to separate gun control from gun responsibility

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Because reponsibility cannot be legislated. We've proven both morality and even human behavior cannot be meaningfuly legislated, why would something as complex and personal as responisbility be governable by anyone but a person themselves? With all your precious sales requirements and background checks, what's to stop an illicit sale "under the radar?" You ultimately rely on human responsibility for any law to be followed. The only laws independent of human responisbility are Natural Laws, like you need food and water to survive, what goes up will go down, and that people will always circumvent the law. Law exists solely to mete out punishment commensurate with the crime, to incentivize lawful behavior from citizens who wish to continue living, free, and not for those intent on meeting their end in one type of box or another.

It will certainly be inconvenient. But that is hardly my concern.

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How about you offer up your own "inconvenience" for once and tolerate gunowners being responsible with their own property. You said yourself such regulation doesn't concern you, and this proves you have no intention to "debate" or "compromise" with anyone here. I will NOT sacrifice my freedoms for your warm fuzzies, without at least getting something in return besides your endless fear. I'll agree to yet another background check if you agree to eliminate restrictions on all NFA controlled items and allow citizens the constitutionally guaranteed right to bear arms in public (CCW or otherwise).

Agreeing to continue being afraid after the "compromise" because it isn't everything you wanted is not a bargaining position; it merely guarantees calls for more later on. It seems everyone in this nation has forgotten that compromise and debate are built on good faith.

What is the purpose of the Second Amendment? Why did the Founding Fathers put it in the Bill of Rights?

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Obviously, it guarantees access to the means to hunt for personal survival, and nothing more. What else could possibly be worth breaking with the most powerful nation on Earth at the time, than the ability to access hunting freely. You know, hunting was very highly regulated in England and confined to the Elite, so it was disenfranchised peasants in the Colony who stood up to assert their rights to hunt in the "Common." It is the Second Amendment, since it was the second most unimportant issue facing the Founders as they tried to get all thirteen Colonies on board during the Constitutional Congress. Despite weeks of careful reading and argument by the signatories, the amendment neglects to mention anything relating to hunting precisely because the intent of the Founders was so obvious at the time.

Our Founders spent decades debating what was best for a government meant to serve it citizens. The were highly educated men of means, versed in law, science, history, and philosophy. They understood freedom, wealth, historical, and present tyranny. And yet we are arrogant enough to believe hurried, reactionary laws "On my desk by January" are superior legislation, or that the Constitution was not written to mean exactly what it says.

TCB

If gun control could be represented visually, this picture would be it. It only affects those who follow laws already. If you're going to break the "don't murder" laws, then a few more restrictions on when and where you can carry won't matter one bit. People who break laws....break laws. Heaping more restrictions on those who already aren't murderers or thieves doesn't affect those who are murderers or thieves even slightly. They'll just ignore those laws like they do the rest already.

Is that a speedbump? Reminds me of all the "phantom" on/off ramps to the freeways from the access roads here in Texas.

TCB

There needs to be a poll choice that we have too much legislation already, and that is part of the problem. (yes, I'm saying the existing gun laws contributed to Sandy Hook)

I didn't vote because "Absolutely none" doesn't go far enough.

I think we should force the politicians and the press to be truthful about existing gun laws and regulations. I heard very little truth from the President today. We already have background checks in place for weapons purchases, the only "loophole" is face to face individual sales and I challenge anyone to show me the crime wave which began through an individual sale. An individual cannot buy an automatic weapon at any gunshop. Most of the heinous acts committed have been with pistols so why is the debate suddenly on semiauto rifles? There is more at play than the Connecticut tragedy and anyone who is unwilling to admit that fact is either naive or playing against liberty.

so why is the debate suddenly on semiauto rifles

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Because they're scary looking and the people calling for bans are usually driven by emotion, not fact.

Absolutely not. You have to misread my posts to think so.

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Yes you have. Every post you've made in the past days has been along the lines of "if we give up X, they won't ban the rest if it."

You're in the wrong website. Try www.bradycenter.org

1st thing we need to do is to help our mental health professionals...we need lunatic laws that will protect communities...why should the privacy of the mentally challenged override the safety of the community?

why should the privacy of the mentally challenged override the safety of the community?

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Wow. Seriously?

Who determines who's "mentally challenged"? How do they determine it? What kind of privacy? For how long? What rights will they arbitrarily be forced to give up to satisfy your fear?

First the Fast and Furious BATFE debacle fails, so now try an emotional tragedy to stir the anti's? Is it just me or is this administration trying to hard?

1st thing we need to do is to help our mental health professionals...we need lunatic laws that will protect communities...why should the privacy of the mentally challenged override the safety of the community?

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ummm.....wow.


ill tell you what, when you publicly release all your medical records to the world, then maybe we can talk about patient privacy.

We have two issues to consider.

1. Overall gun violence is a criminal management problem, gun control has no effect on it, but I can think of a lot of actions we could take to reduce it.

2. Mass murder, FBI classifies it as 4 or more victims killed in one event. We've had 6-8 mass murders in 2012. What action could we possibly take to identify and stop the next 6-8 mass murderers out of a population of 313 million people?