re: #24 Temporarily Embarrassed Millionaire

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”.

This guy thus would have not been tagged a lunatic under your view of how such a law would function:

One of James Holmes former instructors at the University of California-Riverside told The Huffington Post that Holmes was exceptionally smart, competent with complicated science.

Hongxia Wang said Holmes worked with him in a project doing complex oligonucleotide separation through a process called high-performance liquid chromatography. Oligonucleotides are essential for gene therapy.
Hongxia, in an email, described Holmes as a motivated young student, who apparently took a dramatic turn towards darkness.
“He was a smart guy and a quick learner. He asked a lot of questions when I taught him how to use HPLC, which was good because he was thinking actively. As a result, he was able to use it well, independantly and very quickly.” Hongxia said. “This is impressive, compared to other undergraduates I worked with before.”

“I had a great time working together with him,” Wang said. “As for personality, he was nice, easy-going and liked to share his opinions with others.”