Comment

Aurora Press Conference Open Thread

24
First As Tragedy, Then As Farce7/20/2012 6:32:47 pm PDT

I’m perhaps a bit more strongly “pro-2nd Amendment” than a lot of people with whom I share opinions in general, but there are a lot of places I think the laws regarding ownership could be tightened up significantly without undue imposition on anyone’s liberty. The “gun show loophole” for one thing, as well as the completely legal undocumented transfer of weapons between private individuals (which I suppose are actually the same thing, now that I think about it). I think the FFL regs are pretty good to the extent that they’re enforced, and I am leaning towards the idea that unlicensed sale should be done away with. It’s a huge can of worms, to be sure.

That said, bans on specific types of weapons are completely misguided. Most of the restrictions in the Brady ban were based on misconceptions that, as far as I can tell, primarily came from TV and movies. To believe that many of those restrictions made any sort of rational sense is to believe that firearms work in ways that they assuredly do not work.

I think it’s more important to focus on behavior rather than implements. I prefer lunatic control over gun control, but it seems that nobody with any influence is really willing to talk about that. Anti-gun types are hung up on high-capacity magazines and cosmetics, while the other side seems to think that while unlimited access to guns is a god-given right, increased access to [mental] healthcare is a horrible atrocity that would have made Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot have trouble sleeping at night. That’s to say nothing of the idea of maybe making it a little — just a little — harder to buy 6000 rounds of ammo without anyone taking even a cursory interest in your “hobby”.