I own guns, and I am your friend. [View all]

[sir pball]

We need to work together. I'm the one who is most ashamed at gun crime...that's nothing I stand for or believe in.

I own guns and I quite like them - in the same way I love my bike, and my cars when I have them (NYC is as bad for cars as guns..). As mechanical items that I can tinker with endlessly in search of a bit more performance, be it accuracy or speed. But I digress.

I also support a lot of pretty strong gun control, just not the kind of regulations that play to the masses. I don't support an AWB because practically, it's a silly feel-good law that frankly does ban guns on looks (Patton called the M1 Garand "the greatest battle implement ever devised" and it's not by any definition an "assault weapon&quot and pragmatically is a piss-poor way to spend political capital; ~350 murders with rifles of *all kinds* vs. 6,500+ with handguns is a telling statistic to where we should be focusing our efforts.

I think every firearms transaction, be it from a dealer, at a gun show, through the classifieds in the local paper, or from your best friend, should go through an FFL (licensed dealer) and be recorded on a 4473 (the ATF form that records any gun sold via a dealer); I don't like registration but I'm very much in favor of traceability and I think the difference needs to be clarified and promoted. I'm entirely OK with magazine limits - my preferred handgun, and my home-defense gun, both carry 8, and my so-called "assault" rifle can't handle more than five without starting to damage the $700 barrel. You say 30-round mags are "ideal" for home defense? That makes my head spin - who or what is gonna assault your home that you need 30 rounds to stop? At that point I'm cutting my losses and running out the backdoor. I have two mags and the second one is for a defended retreat.

Licensing, fine with me - I routinely have a concealed-carry permit, which is advertising to the government that I own guns, so making it mandatory? No problem. Hell, I've openly said I would be fine with bringing all guns in America under the same very strict laws that regulate machine guns in exchange for some realistically minor concessions. And that's just off the top of my head - probably 85% of gun control I support but the polarized nature of the debate and especially the weird fixation on the fucking AWB makes it a hard if not impossible discussion to have.

I know that simply saying "I own guns" makes people here recoil in disgust and fear, and tends to cut off a lot of constructive dialogue - but I own guns, and I am more your friend than you may think.