I am going to go against the trend here and agree with the OP, with the following caveat: it must be proved that the owner of the firearm was negligent in the events that lead to the use of his firearm by another person to commit a crime.
Registration is a red herring, in how many cases do you think the police will be unable to find out who the owner of the gun is, which was used to commit a crime in the current situation? I am guessing not a lot, and in high profile incidents such as the recent school shooting...possibly close to nil. If ownership can't be proved, then so be it, the owner gets off.
If Lanza's mother left the rifle out for her son to have unfettered access to it, then that was negligent on her part. He was obviously a disturbed individual, she knew about this and therefore it was negligent of her as the owner to let her son have free unsupervised access to that rifle.
On the other hand if Adam Lanza had to break into a safe to get the rifle, that's a different story. She has then taken reasonable steps to secure the rifle. Same applies to a situation where he forcibly removes the rifle (or pistols) from her person.
It seems like an alien concept to some, but rights don't absolve a person of responsibility. Especially these days where it seems the individual sense of responsibility is pretty thin on the ground. With rights come responsibility, if you can't trust a person 100% to do as you would do with a firearm, why let them have access to it?
If you leave a gun laying around where someone of lesser morals (than what you purport the greater gun community is imbued with) can get it with ease, then you must "pay the bill" for whatever high jinx he gets up to with that firearm. That's a whole lot preferable to a ban on certain guns or magazines across the board. It is the most palatable of all the restrictions that could be levied in this situation.
There are no wins here, only losses. When the 5th mass shooting in a year results in 20 body bags coming out of an elementary school, something has to change. The preferred end point is denial of access to firearms by persons for whom such access is inappropriate and dangerous. I think in an ideal world it would be nice to develop the means to detect these nutcases and remove them from society.
But that is going to be a slow process with a questionable mode of diagnosis and reporting and also a period of latency whilst symptoms are equivocal.
So I think the OP's point is about self-policing of firearms by owners once they have already been purchased instead of making compromises on the other end which affect the initial acquisition (bans etc).
I know this post may irk some of the more vocal chest-thumpers. You may now commence flaming
