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Originally Posted by Edward64
I'm assuming you fall under total-or-near-total-ban camp.
Go after the criminals that steal the guns, spend the effort on taking guns away from the criminals. Do a 3 strikes and you are out, toss the key away.
For whatever it's worth to you, if a gun-owner has been found negligent, fine him and/or do a 3 strikes and you are out also. Plenty of options to explore before you take away the right to own weapons.
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I'm not entirely sure where I stand on a ban....it seems like such an unlikely prospect that I don't/haven't put that much energy towards the prospect. I think I'm simply in the 'do something/anything' camp like pretty much everybody else right now. That said if it came up on a ballot, sure I'd vote for a total ban, but I am certainly not exactly excited by the thought of indirectly pouring more money into institutional law enforcement/prisons either.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Edward64
Regarding mentally ill, I assume majority/many of mass killers are mentally unstable? Why wouldn't we put effort here to restrict gun access?
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Because we put very little effort into identifying or supporting the mentally ill in the first place, and to start doing some slight oversight (and further demonization) for the explicit purpose of upsetting firearm culture as little as possible, while children are dying in droves, would be ridiculous, entirely tone-deaf and practically insulting to the victims of gun violence let alone the mentally ill.
For the record, and full transparency my life has been affected by gun violence pretty significantly. I've said it plenty before but I wouldn't expect y'all to memorize my personal history, and I don't mean it as an argument trump card, or conversation stopper, so much as I hope it better explains where my perspective/passion comes from: My dad killed himself with a shotgun, my cousin was murdered by a mentally ill co-worker with a hunting rifle, and my friend works for the school system up here and had to clean children's brains off the wall after the Roseburg massacre. Your mileage may vary.
I do think it says
something about our gun culture that, even entirely discounting the nearly constant barrage of dead folks in the news, we've also got multiple folks in here who have lost loved ones to gun violence and mass murders, friends and family that they will never see again, and yet this discussion (just like the national one) still somehow ends up being framed as if it's gun owners who are in danger of potentially losing access to something they value.