I am one of the gun nuts here. I own a number of firearms and took three of them to Iraq with me. I do not hunt.

Frankly though, the gun culture’s position on any kind of regulation (“out of my cold dead fingers”) is the basest insanity. I have a fair amount of training and experience with firearms, some of it in actual combat. I favor the licensing of gun owners over the registration of individual firearms. This would not be so much to monitor people for illegal activity as to ensure that they are stable enough and have enough training to handle lethal weapons responsibly. It is a fairly tall order. Throughout its history the NRA has insisted that extensive training and regular practice are essential for responsible gun ownership. Paradoxically though they oppose any effort to make this mandatory.

Voluntary compliance won’t cut it. It would be nice if nobody would buy a gun without really knowing what they are doing, or why. That won’t happen in the real world though. Society has every right to intervene in this business, since the consequences are immediate and lethal. The cold dead fingers crowd yelp about the possibility of the evil gummint confiscating their guns if these are registered. Licensing owners and not the objects themselves would seem to eliminate this fear, but the kooks will only come back and claim that owner licensing would make it easy for pinkos and socialists to round up gun owners instead. Er, who is going to round up fifty or a hundred million people; armed no less; and how?

In any case, we cannot let paranoid conspiracy theories dictate legislation, especially not in matters of life and death.