All right. In a nutshell:
1. Make every gun sale go through an FFL.
2. Mandatory basic psychological background checks for all gun purchases. If the buyer isn't a danger to themselves or others, they get the gun. Buyer can re-apply with a clean slate 365 days later if turned down.
3. An 8 hour safety/legal course, including range time, required for gun ownership, much like most states already require for concealed carry. Renew every 5 years.
4. If the buyer lives with a person with a history of mental instability, require the guns to be locked up when not in use. Checks on all residents of a given household would be impractical, but make it a felony to have the guns accessible when not in use. Hammer this point home during said safety course: If a person in your family is at any time found to be mentally unstable and so much as handled one of your guns, you will have your guns taken away and be thrown in jail. A gun is considered "in use" when it occupies the same room as its owner and is not in the hands of a mentally unstable person.
5. Legalize/regulate marijuana. Consider legalizing other drugs under harsher regulation. Lessens gang violence, lessens gun crime.
6. Provide free mental healthcare to those unable to afford a private option. Proof of not being able to afford private mental healthcare would be a requirement to obtain treatment.
7. The database of gun licenses should be state-based, held to a standard of complete automation and encryption such that it cannot be universally accessed by any government official or police office. It's a black box, with the only functions being enter license, renew license, delete license, verify license. The only way to access a specific license would be via a unique ID number known only to the licensee. If this number is lost, the licensee will have to reapply from scratch.
In one sentence: Increase access to mental healthcare and hold any would-be gun owner to a basic standard of responsibility. No system's perfect, but I think the above would be orders of magnitude more effective than any flat ban of any variety.
I was all set to be a dick and start pointing out that none of those things would have stopped the newtown shooting and then point out how criminals don't follow the laws and how you are just punishing law abiding citizens.
But I won't and I'll just say thanks, I'd agree with most of it but I'd prefer if state agencies could communicate with each other.
Other than that I will now watch as the pro gun nuts pick apart your proposals.
Great argument for magazine limits you got there.the soldiers tried to rush the guy twice while he was reloading and they failed. More reloads = more chances to rush.
For starters,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_McVeigh
- Tim McVeigh.
That's right, Tim McVeigh is making the argument that in the big scope of things, killing 168 people in OK City is no big deal. In that year it was probably a fraction of all deaths by car accidents and drowning in swimming pools, so why is everyone so outraged?
Great argument for magazine limits you got there.
If the magazine jams, there is a distinct opportunity to take action, that is much longer than needing to reload without a jam. In a scenario in which a mass murderer has picked his hunting grounds well, or learned them sell enough (the usual case), there simply is not enough time to go from trying to be safe under/behind cover, to attacking, on a reload.
Ft. Hood I believe showed the deadliness of extended 30 round magazines in pistols.
the soldiers tried to rush the guy twice while he was reloading and they failed. More reloads = more chances to rush.
And yes, the guy was stopped by an armed guard. So that means put more armed guards. But also try to restrict the power of weaponry so that the armed guards actually have a chance in a shootout.
And if some of the soldiers had been carrying they wouldn't have needed to rush him.
Thank you for making such a good argument for concealed carry.
Well I suppose the fundamental difference is Tim McVeigh was a batshit crazy extremist who killed 168 innocent people in a bombing, and the NRA did not.
Maybe it would be more productive to compare McVeigh to the shooters in Newtown, Aurora, Vtech, etc etc...
Great argument for magazine limits you got there.
If the magazine jams, there is a distinct opportunity to take action, that is much longer than needing to reload without a jam. In a scenario in which a mass murderer has picked his hunting grounds well, or learned them well enough (the usual case), there simply is not enough time to go from trying to be safe under/behind cover, to attacking, on a reload.
at the cost of accidental death and fistfights becoming shootouts.
There's a good reason why weapons are locked up on army bases.
So should they rush a shooter with safety scissors then? How about Nerf bats? Or would water balloons be the best self defense option in your opinion?
If you think victims need to be able to stop a mass shooter give them the tools to do it.
So, like Tim McVeigh you and the NRA agree on something. Is this thread a coming out party? Are you going to commit mass murder, karmy?But at the same time I do agree with the NRA proposal of more armed guards.
No, he thinks if we ban guns, there won't be a mass shooter to rush in the first place.
Reality doesn't have balance factors like games do. An AR-15 is in no way more deadly than any other semi-automatic gun, by any factor of its nature. You keep going back to this, but it's just not true.I think if you reduce the deadly capacity of weapons, then these mass freakout events are less deadly. Just like how on the same day as newtown there was a freakout in China with a knife and no one died.
Also, a guard with a handgun at the school would have been outgunned by the shooter, who had an AR15 rifle. So for guards to work, you do need to reduce the overall power of guns available.
So what I hear is that the possibility of stopping an aettacker by letting civilians arm themselves isn't worth the fear to my fellow gun haters?
Your priorities are clear. Thanks
Ideally there'd be an armed guard nearby. That would reduce the danger of guns being shot during fist fights.
But you do realize that the NRA is not advocating arming teachers, which is a somewhat responsible position on their part.
I do think that if you reduce the deadly capacity of guns, that when a bad guy slips through the cracks, the shootings will be less deadly. But at the same time I do agree with the NRA proposal of more armed guards.
No, he thinks if we ban guns, there won't be a mass shooter to rush in the first place.
Fist fights are extremely rare in real life. Your typical fight takes less than 2 minutes to transform into two red-faced men grunting in a awkward pile on the ground.
And yet, fists kill more per year than rifles of any variety. I propose a ban on "assault hands."
'Assault Hands' has already been defined (any hand with a selector switch for Chuck Norris mode). What you need is an ambiguous, similar-sounding pseudo-name like "Assault Clappers" or something. And, let's be frank, you can keep your hands as long as they only have a 5 finger capacity.
here's a fun stat: Many times more people were killed in ny last year on the subway than by assault weapons.
Here's a fun stat: many times more people were killed in NY last year by everything than by assault weapons.