The Messiness of Life
Arfin, you make a very good point. However, there are some people that are not in jail any longer (or even yet) that would not be permitted to have a gun, and I agree with the assessment - persons with a restraining order, persons with mental illness, or persons who are out of prison but were convicted for some variation of domestic violence are all people I wouldn't want to put a gun into the hand of. These are all people that would be out on the street.
From my sig line:
"Look at it this way. If America frightens you, feel free to live somewhere else. There are plenty of other countries that don't suffer from excessive liberty. America is where the Liberty is. Liberty is not certified safe."
There is much of life that simply isn't safe, and nerfing up everything, enacting a whole new layer of prior restraint laws, and performing pointless "background checks" on the citizenry isn't going to fix that.
It wasn't broken in 1967.
They "fixed" it in 1968.
And magically, "prohibited persons" continued to murder people with guns, because people willing to break the law, amazingly, also don't follow the rules.
So they added extra layers to the "fix" and nothing got better, but we wound up with more places where we couldn't carry, and more "special" configurations that we couldn't buy or own.
And "prohibited persons" continue to murder people with guns. Because, to them, all the new rules do not apply. These are criminals, remember? Why would another law matter?
And so, here we are today discussing whether we owe it to the people who want to shackle us to "prove" to them that we're well behaved.
That's sheer folly.
We've always been well behaved. And the bad guys have always misbehaved. And when you make a rule that disarms people who follow the rules, the bad guys are still armed.
There's a whole world of magical thinking out there which believes that rules are magic spells and that rules can prevent or compel things.
This same magical thinking community also believes that
a group of people is somehow wiser than an individual person, evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.
You aren't
ever going to be able to prevent crazy or evil people from killing other people. Ever. Understand? No amount of rule making or compliance enforcement or prior restraint or psychiatric pre-testing
or anything else is ever going to accomplish that. Ever.
And it is madness to try.
Instead, make the default assumption that people are good -- you will be right more than 90% of the time -- and that people are smart enough to take care of themselves (and allow them to fail when they're not), and give people the means to defend their own lives, families, and property from predators, marauders, and pirates.
Have the police chase down the bandits who live through their attempts on the decent folk.
Life is messy. It can't really be any other way.
If you really want to enforce background checks and do profiling for insanity or latent evil intent, then that bracket of prior restraint should be applied first and foremost -- and only -- to anyone who covets public office.
And the penalties for lying to the electorate should be basically the same as those currently levied for "lying to congress."
The ownership and carry of firearms should be so commonplace as to be unremarkable, inspiring any criticism only as a function of bad fashion taste, like for wearing a brown holster with a black belt and shoes, or putting wood grips on a Glock.
Look, if
everyone is armed, and it is
known that everyone is armed, then it doesn't matter that the bad guys are armed.
And if you do have someone who is so evil that you dare not trust him even among an armed populace, then you won't be letting him out among them, now, would you?
