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>You cannot possibly believe that you can confiscate all the guns in the US. You don't need to confiscate all guns to practically eliminate gun crime. The UK d

>You cannot possibly believe that you can confiscate all the guns in the US. You don't need to confiscate all guns to practically eliminate gun crime. The UK didn't, we just adopted a harm reduction model, gradually controlling and then removing those weapons with the greatest risk for harm and the least legitimate use - handguns and semi-automatic centrefire rifles. It took decades, but it worked. Start with a serious federal licensing and registration system. Establish a national database with comprehensive ownership records, including private transfers; require firearm manufacturers to submit forensic samples of bullets and casings for all new firearms. Mandate firing pin microstamping. Fix the known shortcomings of the background check system. Close the gun show loophole. Instate the five-day waiting period originally proposed in the Brady Act. Require secure storage of all firearms in an approved gunsafe. Introduce mandatory safety training. Impose considerably harsher punishments for reckless or dangerous use of a licensed firearm. Once you've got all that in place, then you can start talking about buybacks, amnesties and outright bans, starting with Title II firearms. Mandate a legitimate sporting or professional justification for the purchase or transfer of any firearm. Ban large-capacity magazines, then centerfire handguns, then semi-automatic rimfire handguns, then semi-automatic rifles. After 30 or 40 years of incremental progress, you end up with a society that has a negligible number of handguns and semi-automatic rifles, while still maintaining the rights of sportsmen and farmers to own shotguns and bolt-action rifles in a properly controlled manner. You can do it, if you can muster a serious and well-funded opposition to the NRA.

megaman22 9y ago
I'm litearally rolling on the floor laughing at this naivete. Shit, I grew up in the woods where the semi-auto Remington 742 woodsmaster or the 1100 shotgun wasn't any different than the Ace hardware hoe or the Rotenone or Sevin bug dust; we used both to keep the pests out of the garden that fed us. I've bought one firearm, out of a dozen, from a licensed store. Almost all are private, individual to individual sales or inherited.
GiorgioG 9y ago
> Start with a serious federal licensing and registration system. Good luck getting that kind of law passed anywhere outside of NY/CA. Registration = Confiscation is a strongly held belief. See how many New Yorkers registered their AR-15 when the NY SAFE Act was passed in the middle of the night. > Close the gun show loophole. There is no loophole. Federally-licensed gun dealers must run background checks no matter where they sell their wares. Private transfers do not require background checks. > After 30 or 40 years of incremental progress What you call "progress," I call a city-slicker's fantasy paradise. I grew up in a nanny state (NY) and moved south in my mid-30s. It's refreshing to live in a place where guns are seen as tools and not as evil monsters that charge out of their locked cases and mow down innocent children all on their own without a human pulling the trigger. The sitting president (regardless of what you or I think of him) was elected on a base that believes in a different idea of progress. I voted for him stricktly because I believed he'd be largely ineffective and that he wouldn't shit all over my gun rights.
- pjc50 9y ago
  So, incidents like the Vegas massacre; is there any response to this kind of thing at all you'd accept, or is it just not a problem that 58 people got killed and hundreds wounded?
  - GiorgioG 9y ago
    I understand and empathize with the desire to do something to prevent incidents like this. The issue with the anti-gun movement is that it focuses on the tool and not the human. We have a serious mental health problem in this country. Far too many young men are angry (depressed?) and in need of help but seeking mental help is seen as not a manly thing to do. Yes we should do something, but gun control laws (at least those in this country that we are ALL willing to tolerate) will not yield the outcome you desire. I realize most of you won’t do this, but go take a firearms class and learn to shoot. It’s a skill worth learning. As a reader of this forum you are likely to enjoy tinkering and building useful, mechanical things. By far the funnest thing I’ve done is build an AR-15 (gasp! Those things are evil!) from parts. Despite the media’s demonization of this non-military non-assault weapon, the AR-15 is a standardized component platform very much like the PC or LEGOs. That isn’t to imply that it’s easy to build one (lots of swearing involved in getting trigger springs and pins lined up in the small spaces, etc.) We all want to reduce gun violence, but as history in the US has proven, stricter gun control is not the most effective answer IMO.
    - pjc50 9y ago
      I'm a Brit who was taught to shoot at school (http://whitgift-ccf.co.uk/about.html http://whitgift-ccf.co.uk/about.html), so I have a rather different perspective on this. I wouldn't describe it as fear or unfamiliarity, just a belief about risks and benefits. (One of those life experiences that seems weirder and weirder in retrospect; imagine Hogwarts with SA80s. The ammunition was tightly supervised, but unloaded weapons less so) I'm not sure you could untangle the "mental health" aspect of mass shootings from the politics of it. Some of it is "extroverted suicide" but a lot looks to me like people have been radicalised.
  - 9y ago
junkscience2017 9y ago
I don't put communal values above my own family's safety, and probably a good ten million others in the US who would agree basically a full scale gun grab would result in Civil War 2, the harm far outweighing the benefit you can't jail us all
- jdietrich 9y ago
  >I don't put communal values above my own family's safety Having a firearm in the home makes your family less safe. The potential benefits of protection from violent crime are vastly outweighed by the risks of accidents, suicide and domestic homicide. You might believe otherwise, you might believe that you're different, but the data doesn't lie. The gun that poses the greatest threat to your life is the one you own. https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/160/10/929/140858 https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/160/10/929/140858
  - junkscience2017 9y ago
    but why stop there, your own home would be statistically safer without a motor vehicle, alcohol or knives. and wow I hope you aren't in possession of perscription drugs, haven't you heard we are suffering an opioid epidemic? isn't it time you thought of the children? and as it stands I also believe one should have the right to take one's own life, so I completely discount scare tactics predicated on suicide stats
  - Casseres 9y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias There are many instances where guns saving lives never make it into reports/statistics. Here are a few that do: https://bearingarms.com/category/guns-saving-lives/ https://bearingarms.com/category/guns-saving-lives/ Imagine this: What if you were told you were no longer allowed to drive or even ride in a car, because the chance of dying in a car accident (in your own car even!) was too great? Wouldn't you say it's up to you to balance the level of risk you're willing to take to engage in the freedom of expeditious travel?

megaman22 9y ago

I'm litearally rolling on the floor laughing at this naivete. Shit, I grew up in the woods where the semi-auto Remington 742 woodsmaster or the 1100 shotgun wasn't any different than the Ace hardware hoe or the Rotenone or Sevin bug dust; we used both to keep the pests out of the garden that fed us. I've bought one firearm, out of a dozen, from a licensed store. Almost all are private, individual to individual sales or inherited.

GiorgioG 9y ago

> Start with a serious federal licensing and registration system. Good luck getting that kind of law passed anywhere outside of NY/CA. Registration = Confiscation is a strongly held belief. See how many New Yorkers registered their AR-15 when the NY SAFE Act was passed in the middle of the night. > Close the gun show loophole. There is no loophole. Federally-licensed gun dealers must run background checks no matter where they sell their wares. Private transfers do not require background checks. > After 30 or 40 years of incremental progress What you call "progress," I call a city-slicker's fantasy paradise. I grew up in a nanny state (NY) and moved south in my mid-30s. It's refreshing to live in a place where guns are seen as tools and not as evil monsters that charge out of their locked cases and mow down innocent children all on their own without a human pulling the trigger. The sitting president (regardless of what you or I think of him) was elected on a base that believes in a different idea of progress. I voted for him stricktly because I believed he'd be largely ineffective and that he wouldn't shit all over my gun rights.

pjc50 9y ago
So, incidents like the Vegas massacre; is there any response to this kind of thing at all you'd accept, or is it just not a problem that 58 people got killed and hundreds wounded?
- GiorgioG 9y ago
  I understand and empathize with the desire to do something to prevent incidents like this. The issue with the anti-gun movement is that it focuses on the tool and not the human. We have a serious mental health problem in this country. Far too many young men are angry (depressed?) and in need of help but seeking mental help is seen as not a manly thing to do. Yes we should do something, but gun control laws (at least those in this country that we are ALL willing to tolerate) will not yield the outcome you desire. I realize most of you won’t do this, but go take a firearms class and learn to shoot. It’s a skill worth learning. As a reader of this forum you are likely to enjoy tinkering and building useful, mechanical things. By far the funnest thing I’ve done is build an AR-15 (gasp! Those things are evil!) from parts. Despite the media’s demonization of this non-military non-assault weapon, the AR-15 is a standardized component platform very much like the PC or LEGOs. That isn’t to imply that it’s easy to build one (lots of swearing involved in getting trigger springs and pins lined up in the small spaces, etc.) We all want to reduce gun violence, but as history in the US has proven, stricter gun control is not the most effective answer IMO.
  - pjc50 9y ago
    I'm a Brit who was taught to shoot at school (http://whitgift-ccf.co.uk/about.html http://whitgift-ccf.co.uk/about.html), so I have a rather different perspective on this. I wouldn't describe it as fear or unfamiliarity, just a belief about risks and benefits. (One of those life experiences that seems weirder and weirder in retrospect; imagine Hogwarts with SA80s. The ammunition was tightly supervised, but unloaded weapons less so) I'm not sure you could untangle the "mental health" aspect of mass shootings from the politics of it. Some of it is "extroverted suicide" but a lot looks to me like people have been radicalised.
- 9y ago

junkscience2017 9y ago

I don't put communal values above my own family's safety, and probably a good ten million others in the US who would agree basically a full scale gun grab would result in Civil War 2, the harm far outweighing the benefit you can't jail us all

jdietrich 9y ago
>I don't put communal values above my own family's safety Having a firearm in the home makes your family less safe. The potential benefits of protection from violent crime are vastly outweighed by the risks of accidents, suicide and domestic homicide. You might believe otherwise, you might believe that you're different, but the data doesn't lie. The gun that poses the greatest threat to your life is the one you own. https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/160/10/929/140858 https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/160/10/929/140858
- junkscience2017 9y ago
  but why stop there, your own home would be statistically safer without a motor vehicle, alcohol or knives. and wow I hope you aren't in possession of perscription drugs, haven't you heard we are suffering an opioid epidemic? isn't it time you thought of the children? and as it stands I also believe one should have the right to take one's own life, so I completely discount scare tactics predicated on suicide stats
- Casseres 9y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias There are many instances where guns saving lives never make it into reports/statistics. Here are a few that do: https://bearingarms.com/category/guns-saving-lives/ https://bearingarms.com/category/guns-saving-lives/ Imagine this: What if you were told you were no longer allowed to drive or even ride in a car, because the chance of dying in a car accident (in your own car even!) was too great? Wouldn't you say it's up to you to balance the level of risk you're willing to take to engage in the freedom of expeditious travel?