SilverMK2 wrote:
Any chance of a synopsis? On my phone with crappy signal

 cincydooley wrote:
I think one of the obligations of a responsible gun owner is to be trained in the use of them. That means regular range sessions, teaching others living in the home how to use them, and maintaining them properly.

I can't imagine many responsible gun owners would feel diff from this.

 Steve steveson wrote:

 cincydooley wrote:
I think one of the obligations of a responsible gun owner is to be trained in the use of them. That means regular range sessions, teaching others living in the home how to use them, and maintaining them properly.

I can't imagine many responsible gun owners would feel diff from this.

I think if that were the case many people would have a very different view, but unfortunately the only way to ensure that you only have responsible gun owners is licensing, which is where the crunch point is. Yes, irresponsible gun owners are most of the problem, but how do you stop people from being dumbasses? Two ways, social pressure or legal requirements, neither of which seem to be acceptable to many people.

 Frankenberry wrote:
@cincydooley You just listed everything responsible gun owners do.

 Frankenberry wrote:
See, licenses aren't needed. There are laws that prohibit the use of a gun incorrectly; murder, manslaughter, attempted murder, etc. I don't see why there needs to be a whole new set of laws to regulate what I do with my property that aren't already covered by existing laws. That's sort of the point a lot of people miss, it isn't that pro-gun folks are against being responsible, it's that we're against being forced to register our property for no reason.

 Ouze wrote:

I would add only "Storing them securely, as appropriate to your situation".

Someone (later in the thread) said they didn't feel social pressure worked. I think it's not being applied often enough. Slate started a thing some time back where they started collecting details of "accidental" child firearm incidents, and simultaneously were urging media outlets to no longer report such events as "accidental". I strongly agree with this. An actual firearms accident is quite rare, but firearm negligence is sadly much more commonplace.

If you keep your glock under your couch and your kid shoots himself or a sibling with it, then I know that you have suffered a tragedy and I know how that feels - but I also think you should go to jail.

 Frankenberry wrote:

 Steve steveson wrote:

 cincydooley wrote:
I think one of the obligations of a responsible gun owner is to be trained in the use of them. That means regular range sessions, teaching others living in the home how to use them, and maintaining them properly.

I can't imagine many responsible gun owners would feel diff from this.

I think if that were the case many people would have a very different view, but unfortunately the only way to ensure that you only have responsible gun owners is licensing, which is where the crunch point is. Yes, irresponsible gun owners are most of the problem, but how do you stop people from being dumbasses? Two ways, social pressure or legal requirements, neither of which seem to be acceptable to many people.

See, licenses aren't needed. There are laws that prohibit the use of a gun incorrectly; murder, manslaughter, attempted murder, etc. I don't see why there needs to be a whole new set of laws to regulate what I do with my property that aren't already covered by existing laws. That's sort of the point a lot of people miss, it isn't that pro-gun folks are against being responsible, it's that we're against being forced to register our property for no reason.

 cincydooley wrote:
I think one of the obligations of a responsible gun owner is to be trained in the use of them. That means regular range sessions, teaching others living in the home how to use them, and maintaining them properly.

I can't imagine many responsible gun owners would feel diff from this.

 cincydooley wrote:

 Frankenberry wrote:
See, licenses aren't needed. There are laws that prohibit the use of a gun incorrectly; murder, manslaughter, attempted murder, etc. I don't see why there needs to be a whole new set of laws to regulate what I do with my property that aren't already covered by existing laws. That's sort of the point a lot of people miss, it isn't that pro-gun folks are against being responsible, it's that we're against being forced to register our property for no reason.

Additionally, charge morons that have kids kill themselves with firearms that weren't properly stored with Negligent Manslaughter or something like that.

If the government made firearms safety and training classes tax write offs, that could potentially help. I mean, it IS education.

@Steve - I don't think licensing is the only way to ensure you have responsible owners. We require people to take a driving test once, and that sure as gak doesn't yield tons of responsible drivers....

 cincydooley wrote:


Agree pretty much in full. We didn't have a large safe for my shotguns until very recently, because there were never any kids in the house and there was really no reason to. As there have been children in the house, we now do. Easy peasy.

You know, if we actually upheld the gun laws on the books vigilantly, there'd be far fewer problems.

 Steve steveson wrote:

Many things are licensed and regulated to stop dumb people doing dumb things, like driving licenses, concealed carry permits, etc. The concept of regulating access to something to stop people doing something dangerous is a well established concept.

 Steve steveson wrote:

 cincydooley wrote:


Agree pretty much in full. We didn't have a large safe for my shotguns until very recently, because there were never any kids in the house and there was really no reason to. As there have been children in the house, we now do. Easy peasy.

You know, if we actually upheld the gun laws on the books vigilantly, there'd be far fewer problems.

Quite possibly. That may be the answer. Uphold the laws that already exist, but at the moment that isn't being done.

 Steve steveson wrote:

 cincydooley wrote:
I think one of the obligations of a responsible gun owner is to be trained in the use of them. That means regular range sessions, teaching others living in the home how to use them, and maintaining them properly.

I can't imagine many responsible gun owners would feel diff from this.

I think if that were the case many people would have a very different view, but unfortunately the only way to ensure that you only have responsible gun owners is licensing, which is where the crunch point is. Yes, irresponsible gun owners are most of the problem, but how do you stop people from being dumbasses? Two ways, social pressure or legal requirements, neither of which seem to be acceptable to many people.

Ive been almost killed by far more "dumbassery" via motor vehicles then I have via guns

If the government made firearms safety and training classes tax write offs, that could potentially help. I mean, it IS education.

Does the Second Amendment prevent Congress from passing gun-control laws? The question, which is suddenly pressing, in light of the reaction to the school massacre in Newtown, is rooted in politics as much as law.

For more than a hundred years, the answer was clear, even if the words of the amendment itself were not. The text of the amendment is divided into two clauses and is, as a whole, ungrammatical: “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” The courts had found that the first part, the “militia clause,” trumped the second part, the “bear arms” clause. In other words, according to the Supreme Court, and the lower courts as well, the amendment conferred on state militias a right to bear arms—but did not give individuals a right to own or carry a weapon.

Enter the modern National Rifle Association. Before the nineteen-seventies, the N.R.A. had been devoted mostly to non-political issues, like gun safety. But a coup d’état at the group’s annual convention in 1977 brought a group of committed political conservatives to power—as part of the leading edge of the new, more rightward-leaning Republican Party. (Jill Lepore recounted this history in a recent piece for The New Yorker.) The new group pushed for a novel interpretation of the Second Amendment, one that gave individuals, not just militias, the right to bear arms. It was an uphill struggle. At first, their views were widely scorned. Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, who was no liberal, mocked the individual-rights theory of the amendment as “a fraud.”

But the N.R.A. kept pushing—and there’s a lesson here. Conservatives often embrace “originalism,” the idea that the meaning of the Constitution was fixed when it was ratified, in 1787. They mock the so-called liberal idea of a “living” constitution, whose meaning changes with the values of the country at large. But there is no better example of the living Constitution than the conservative re-casting of the Second Amendment in the last few decades of the twentieth century. (Reva Siegel, of Yale Law School, elaborates on this point in a brilliant article.)

The re-interpretation of the Second Amendment was an elaborate and brilliantly executed political operation, inside and outside of government. Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 brought a gun-rights enthusiast to the White House. At the same time, Orrin Hatch, the Utah Republican, became chairman of an important subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and he commissioned a report that claimed to find “clear—and long lost—proof that the second amendment to our Constitution was intended as an individual right of the American citizen to keep and carry arms in a peaceful manner, for protection of himself, his family, and his freedoms.” The N.R.A. began commissioning academic studies aimed at proving the same conclusion. An outré constitutional theory, rejected even by the establishment of the Republican Party, evolved, through brute political force, into the conservative conventional wisdom.

 Frankenberry wrote:
See, licenses aren't needed. There are laws that prohibit the use of a gun incorrectly; murder, manslaughter, attempted murder, etc. I don't see why there needs to be a whole new set of laws to regulate what I do with my property that aren't already covered by existing laws. That's sort of the point a lot of people miss, it isn't that pro-gun folks are against being responsible, it's that we're against being forced to register our property for no reason.

 cincydooley wrote:
We require people to take a driving test once, and that sure as gak doesn't yield tons of responsible drivers....

 Peregrine wrote:

 Frankenberry wrote:
See, licenses aren't needed. There are laws that prohibit the use of a gun incorrectly; murder, manslaughter, attempted murder, etc. I don't see why there needs to be a whole new set of laws to regulate what I do with my property that aren't already covered by existing laws. That's sort of the point a lot of people miss, it isn't that pro-gun folks are against being responsible, it's that we're against being forced to register our property for no reason.

Two reasons for licenses:

1) Laws punish you for doing something after the harm is already done. A license attempts to stop you from doing something before it happens.

2) Your examples of existing laws only cover malicious crimes, not accidents or ignorance. A license should ensure that people understand things like self defense laws, safe gun storage and handling, etc, and screen out the people who don't care enough to do those things.

 cincydooley wrote:
We require people to take a driving test once, and that sure as gak doesn't yield tons of responsible drivers....

That's because the driving test (at least around here) is an absolute joke: pull out of the parking spot, turn left, turn left, 3-point turn, drive back to the parking spot and here's your license. It's maybe five minutes of driving, with nothing even remotely challenging. And you certainly don't get anything from the 20-question written test that you can "study for" and pass with a few more minutes of effort. If we actually took driver's licenses seriously things would be very different. For example, to get a license to fly even the smallest planes in the nicest weather you have a legal minimum of 40 hours of flight time in training (plus any classroom time) and a strict checklist of things that have to be covered which makes the real number of hours quite a bit larger (it took me 23.5 hours just to fly solo locally and under supervision, and 63 hours to get my full license). Then you have a verbal test and a ~45 minute checkride with a federal examiner, where you have to demonstrate a long list of tasks, all within fairly strict error margins, and can fail the test at any time if you make a mistake. And that's just the basics. Want to fly passengers for money? Now you need hundreds of hours of flight time, more training, and an even stricter test. Oh, and crash a plane? Have fun re-taking all of those tests before you're allowed to fly again.

 Rotary wrote:
That was a funny video. Yeah, some owners are horrendous, but for every "dumbass" there are thousands of sane, responsible owners.