"Circling back around, I just don't think being able to order guns out of the Sears catalog like the good ole days is feasible or realistic today. So much has changed, parents don't parent, no one has personal responsibility for anything anymore and "mental issues" seem to be way more prevalent."
This is the crux of the main argument by anti gunners. There are two points of view, one, as expressed above, people changed and are no longer trustworthy. The other has been expressed, too - that people never changed at all, they are just the same as ever.
What DID change? America used to allow the people to practice and promulgate Christian ethics and teach them in the schools. In fact, America was, in the beginning, a home schooler culture which emphasized the study of basics at home. It was in the larger cities that people saw the need for schools to be offered to those who couldn't afford them or conduct them, as both parents needed to work, while their children were free ranging across the city. And getting no education but plenty of trouble.
To make the statement above recognizes that there WAS a better, more self disciplined, and less violent public at large, which didn't need government oversight of their purchases. What changed was the American education of children becoming a much larger taxpayer based system, and then, a packed Supreme Court of non judicial appointees telling the taxpayers they couldn't impose their ethics on their own children in their own school district any more. So, the schools quit teaching ethics in classrooms, the press celebrated "God is dead!" and the socialists won a major victory. Close examination of statistics will show from the day of that decision in 1963 that violence and unwed childbirth rates rose quickly for 20 years, along with the use of uncontrolled substances.
People who support the government's oversight in the exercise of our freedoms are the evil in this country who perpetrate the loss of our rights and who undermine the education of our youth by telling them they can do whatever they want without fear of punishment. If you like what you see in the streets be happy. If you don't, then at least realize that at one time, things weren't done like that. The people in general knew better - because we as a nation had insisted they learn it. That education is based on the premise that people DON'T change at all - what changes is our tolerance of their evil.
If they can't discipline themselves, then giving the government all power and authority to do it means losing it ourself. This is the key reason background checks are a device to strip our rights away from the law abiding and aggregate the power of the people to the state to exercise as it will. Another is the continued carving out of the police, exempting them from having to adhere to the restrictions imposed on us. Your local beat cop can have a fully automatic US surplus M16 in his possession, lend lease, free - but you and I are highly restricted from doing so. Yet - I've been trained on it, and multiple other forms of fully auto weapons, served 22 years with continuous training, carried them in flights overseas to the Middle East. The local cop may just be a newly minted Academy graduate with two hours range time with one to qualify. He can possess, I cannot.
The continued support of having government pick and choose who can and cannot is a system of unequal burdens in this day and age. Background checks aren't going to fix that, do not prevent felons or potential felons from getting firearms, and are just a device for people who support losing our rights to the government. Likely because they think they have their carve out for privileged possession.
That means they support one citizens rights over another, which is fundamentally flawed. Therefore they are not a supporter of the Constitution nor are they "American" in the sense of "free rights for all." No, what they want is "we get to pick and choose which of you can have what we have."
GO THRU THE LIST OF KNOWN PERPETRATORS OF MASS SHOOTINGS AND BOMBINGS. The majority DID pass a background check. What good did it do except to make a mockery of the premise it's effective at all? Then read up on the locals in your neighborhood arrested and convicted. How many were felons prohibited from possession? In my area, over 50%. The law does NO good except to prevent and restrict the law abiding their rights.
We are now back full circle - laws do NOT effectively prevent the law breakers from their evil, only effective punishment. It's the "do gooder" who thinks it will, where the rest of us understand that it's the "do badder" who has no inclination to impose self discipline except when his mortality is questioned by one of us.
We know there is evil among us, it's those who wish to impose the State as our supervisor who don't recognize it in themselves.
