Quote:
Originally Posted by dougjb
Cars are dangerous instrumentalities. We register our cars. We pass a driving test to drive this inherently dangerous thing.
We should demand that each and every gun in America be registered. We should demand that each and every gun owner pass a mental fitness test and a rigorous test as to a gun's usage.
Unlike cars, however, we should demand that any person wishing to own more than one gun, PROVE their need!
And, in my plan, anyone not registering all their guns and taking the required tests would be guilty of a criminal act subject to jail time.
Of course, law abiding citizens would want to comply and seek compliance. But, criminals and gun nuts (aka criminals) would forego compliance. Give the coppers another chance to lock these folks up.
Perhaps we might ultimately realize that gun ownership is counterproductive in our society. Then, only criminals and gun nuts will own guns.
Almost all other civilized countries in the world have gotten their arms around gun violence. Shootings in Western Europe, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand have annual shootings of people in the the low two digit range while we have over 30,000. Some like Australia historically had a gun heritage similar to our own (think Wild West). But, when they experienced a nut case going off the rails and shooting up a bunch of people, they got together and realized they could not keep going on this way. Mass ownership of guns in Australia is a thing of the past. New Zealand recently did the same thing. It is not unusual in the UK for instance to be in Southeastern England to have the BBC report a shooting (not a killing) that occured in Scotland, such is the uniqueness of gun violence there. Here, we don't even hear of a killing by a gun being reported in the next neighborhood over.
The time has come for all people, gun owners and non gun owners to demand action.
Ultimately, we should just ban guns...totally....except for cops and military.
For those who argue, guns don't kill people, people kill people, I would argue its a lot easier to ban guns than people. If people want to kill others, let them do it the old fashion way, with fists and stones. We would have a lot fewer mass killings!
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Unconstitutional for sure, and unworkable in any case. Any such move on the part of any government entity would immediately be challenged in court, and it would go down to certain defeat.
There are an estimated 400 million to half a BILLION guns in private hands in this country, and there is "paper" maybe on, at most, 15% of them. Guns are unique in that, given proper care, they do not necessarily deteriorate with age. I've fired guns well over 120 years old and they shoot as well as they did when new. Better, in fact, because ammo has improved so much. Also following WW II the military had huge surpluses of military-grade weapons, several hundred thousand as I recall, mainly M1 Carbines but some older 30-06 rifles and I believe some 1911 pistols, and sold them (many were actually given away) either through intermediaries or by the government itself under the Civilian Marksmanship Program, directly to citizens. There was no record kept of which gun went to which person: you could buy them through the mail--they were actually listed in the Sears & Roebuck catalogue for a time--and they were delivered packed in Cosmolene. Bottom line: if the government appropriated every gun that they could trace to individual owners (very unlikely) that still leaves something like 450 million guns, probably more, in the hands of American citizens and I'll guarantee you that very few of those owners would voluntarily give them up.
We see so much public angst over gun ownership. Don't people understand that there IS a way to get guns out of private hands? It's call a Constitutional Amendment and the mechanism to change the Constitution has been there since the inception of this country. Why don't the anti-gun people take THAT route?