Went to an organizational meeting for a new chapter of MDA today.

[krispos42]

43. Thank you.

Now we can have a discussion, at least for a while. (Apologies for the delay, by the way)

There is nothing anywhere in any of the anti violence organization's literature about confiscation. To claim otherwise is pure NRA gun nuttery. Restrictions that might reduce the amount of violence, yes, but confiscation no.

The NRA likes to promote the "jack-booted thugs coming for your gun" type of confiscation, which is of course bullshit. But what you expect, really? They think that, in a nation with about 2 million people in federal, state, country, and local prisons, we can simply add twelve to twenty million illegal immigrants. That the Border Patrol and ICE can track down and arrest a couple of million illegal immigrants a year, we can try them and convict them, then somehow imprison them. Perhaps in the FEMA camps by hitching a ride on the black UN helicopters flown by Kenyan Muslims.

However, a staple of many gun-control groups is creating a definition of "assault weapon" then banning them. Generally, they want current "assault weapons" registered (grandfathered in) while new sales of new ones are outlawed. Also generally speaking, the owner of a grandfathered "assault weapon" can't sell the gun to anybody that lives in a state where they are outlawed. For example, if I owned a registered "assault weapon" in my home state of Connecticut, I could not sell it to anyone in my state; nor in any other state that has an AWB. My only option for legal sale is to sell the gun to a person in a non-AWB state.

If a federal AWB is passed again and it included this provision, then at some point, over the course of decades, all "assault weapons" would either be owned illegally, permanently rendered inoperable, or turned into the government for destruction. They could not be legally sold to anybody except the government (who would set the price, presumably), and upon the owner's death his or her heirs would be compelled to give the gun up to the government or to destroy them.

If the government creates laws wherein people have no legal choice but to give up guns to the government or have the guns rendered "permanently inoperable", isn't that effectively confiscation?

Straw purchasing is almost impossible to convict. The buyer just says they lost the gun or it was stolen and it's he said he said. Regulations like mandatory reporting of stolen guns and limits on guns/month make straw purchasing and trafficking much more difficult. Care to support either of those?

I've stated before here in the Gungeon (although not in a while; life keeps me away from DU much more so than a few years ago) I don't have a problem with yearly limits on gun purchases. I think 12 a year is entirely reasonable. If you're buying more than that a year, you're either a dealer or a collector, and the ATF has permits for either of those situations. And not per calender year; each purchase adds a "point" to your name. Once you reach twelve points, you can't buy any more guns until a point disappears. And a point takes a year to go away.

I also don't have much of a problem with mandatory reporting; I just don't think it will do any noticeable good.

As for Lanza and Sandy Hook, I'll willingly give you the 20 children slaughtered there if the likes of Dylann Roof could be taken out of the gun culture. No one law will prevent all gun violence just as no speed limit sign will prevent speeding but I like traffic laws because my commute to work is exciting enough as is.

I don't see anything to respond to here because I'm not sure what you're trying to say.

Why won't MDA debate Lott? Why the fuck did I post here thinking that there might be some reasonable response to people trying to reduce gun violence?

I apparently missed this news event, so I have no opinion to offer on the MDA versus John Lott issue. However, my point of view on reducing gun violence is best done by making society better. Treating it as a hardware issue is doomed to achieve minimal positive results, at best. The biggest drop in violence in our nation's history (at least since record-keeping began) was the result of social and environmental policy in the late 60's and early 70's: the widespread use of various birth-control methods by women (primarily the pill and the IUD), the legalization of abortion nationwide, and the removal of lead from gasoline an thus from the air that we breathe. Children born after, say, 1975 (I'm one of them, 1976) were less likely to be born in to circumstances that lead to lives of violence and crime, thus drastically shrinking the pool of people likely to become career violent criminals a generation (about 20 years) later.

We need to take care of ourselves. We need a very strong social-safety net like Western European nations have so that our children can be nurtured and loved and educated, and their parents can be part of a strong family and community unit. We need our people to be free from the fear of poverty, of being uninsured, of being unemployed, and of being uneducated.

Having a population of people that are criminally violence but just doesn't have as many guns isn't really effective, nor does it really make us a better nation.