FUCK THE NRA, the gun-nut wing of the Republican Party.

[DanTex]

151. I think all should be judged on a case by case basis based on risks and benefits.

First of all, the claim that gun laws can't help because the 1% will still go around shooting people is obviously false. For example, in the UK, there are still criminals, but they rarely shoot people because it's so hard to get a gun and the consequences are so stiff for owning one. So gun laws do work.

The question is how much do we value the freedom to own any kind gun we want with little to no restrictions such as registration, background checks, limits to magazine capacity, limits to the number of guns a single person can own or purchase in a given time period, limits to the kinds of weapons suitable for civilian usage -- restrictions, by the way, that don't prevent any law abiding citizen from owning and using a gun responsibly, but only make misuse more difficult. I agree that it's worth something, but in the face of the massive toll that gun violence takes, there's simply no question that our priorities are out of line.

We are talking about 30,000 lives per year taken by guns. Not a small amount, no matter how you try to twist around the statistics. For all the opposition to war, in terms of American lives, a whole decade and two wars doesn't come close to a single year of gun violence -- even if you exclude suicides (despite the ample evidence that guns increase suicide risk), you still have more gun homicides in a year than both wars over a decade.