General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: When You Cannot Pass Even Reasonable Guns Laws In The Light Of Massacres You Are Beyond Hope. [View all]Recursion
(56,582 posts)Last edited Thu Sep 12, 2013, 12:35 AM - Edit history (1)
Or that a lot of people feel about the 2nd Amendment the way many on DU feel about the 4th: that trading liberty for security means you'll end up getting neither?
I do personally think there's a valid tradeoff between liberty and security on guns (and surveillance, for that matter), so I'll leave it to somebody else to defend that. But the first point, about efficacy, is largely my view: most of the gun legislation I see won't, in my opinion, actually do much.
Universal background checks are a good idea but without a national registry or national licensure are basically unenforceable except after the fact (though I'd love to see a national Firearms ID card like in Illinois). But our party keeps charging in with wrong-headed ideas about what types of guns and magazines people can own, completely ignoring the 900-pound-gorilla of the fact that virtually all gun murders (including the majority of mass shootings) are committed using average, ordinary handguns with average, ordinary magazines. (Even the Newtown killer didn't use his extended magazines -- he left them more than half full; the Aurora shooter's extended magazine jammed after 15 shots, as they often do, which probably lowered the death toll because he had to switch weapons.)
That said, just once, I would like to see the discussion on guns moved forward not by a horrific mass shooting but by one of the infinitely more common "ordinary" shootings of one person by another person he or she knows, using a (generally illegally-bought) handgun. If we thought more about that scenario, we might be able to come up with a better policy response.