Hi Trap,

Good questions all. I will respond:

RML-- I'd support some of your ideas, except for one thing. The one thing the gun owners of this country have learned time and again is that the anti-gun movement can't be trusted to say "this is enough." In every single place in the world where gun registration has become the law, gun confiscation has followed in relatively short order -- that obtains even in the U.S.

Response--Fortunately our founders gave us the ability to vote out leaders we dont like so generally they need to remove the system before they can remove the guns. If you know that democracy is in danger, thats when you use your guns-and obviously the gun lobby has always been quite vocal-a move to remove guns while the gun lobby can speak will be hard to miss. Yes, they do have to take your guns first to follow the fascist patterns, but the USA was set up the way it is for a reason-it wont be easy to take over. And while certain weapons have been deemed especially dangerous, with reasons given (ie. the "tommy gun") and then removed from general ownership, guns in general would be hard to take away.

So I'm not big on registration -- for one thing, really what business is it of the governments what weapons I own?

Trap--Its important that the cops know if a nutty has access to guns. If someone gets into your house and overpowers you, dont you want them knowing how many guns the guy has as they try to take him out? Obviously this also applies to you if you lose your sanity and become a danger to others-then how do we know what you have? If you turn out to be a terror cell leader deep in cover, how do we know? And most of all "how many" (refer back to terror cell). No individual needs 200 semi automatic rifles and pistols. I would rather be having our security forces investigating a large acquisition of weapons then the aftermath of their use in a terror raid on a school.

Provided they harm no one, I can't see where they'd be anyone's business but my own and my families --

Response-"provided they harm no one"--The problem there Trap is we wont know if they harm anyone until it happens. We agree when we pay taxes and vote to live under a governments protection-we need to give it the tools to protect us. It can be and should be illegal for the government to seize legally bought weapons just like any other property, so they cant just come and take your guns without a warrant and the required legal authority to take your guns-and lets hope its because they find out you are a terrorist or a nutty, etc. before they do that and before you hurt someone.

and if they harm someone, I'd face the normal penalties of the law regarding either negligence or homicide.

Response--Except that the victims are already dead now. While the penalties are certainly good for delivering justice to some degree, I am sure the loved ones of the victims would prefer that you were disarmed BEFORE the incident.

The other thing is, who does registration really protect? It doesn't protect the law-abiding gun owner. It doesn't protect the illegal gun owner, he's ignoring it and his guns aren't registered. It doesn't protect the unarmed man in the street, as he is not bound by it (he has no arms to register) and if he is robbed or assaulted via the use of a firearm, the best statistics indicate that the weapon will be stolen. Crooks don't register their guns -- and there is even case law that they are free NOT to do so if they are already convicted felons because registering a firearm would be self-incrimination (and hence violate their 5th Amendment rights).

Response--LEGAL gun ownership and registration protects in the ways that I described earlier--the cops know about weapons which are legal. We can see if someone is acquiring lots of guns and wonder why. Why add to the unknowns? Yes, illegal guns and illegal gun owners are an unknown, but notice I think that we need to completely come down on illegal sales and ownership. Just being caught with an illegal gun or being caught selling one should be a LARGE criminal penalty. These are life taking tools and no one not trained and legally allowed to own one should have one.

Another problem with registration lies in legal transfer of ownership.

Response--And here is one of the greatest problems today. Private gun sales. This is how the illegal gun owners get a gun. No more private sales-no more gun shows. You sell to a licensed dealer and he registers it-just like your legally sold car to a dealer. No one will be able to buy your gun without a background check and a license to own.

If I sell an unlicensed car to you, no law has been broken. If I die, and my spouse inherits my unlicensed car, she can have legal ownership. Conversely, in places like New York with rigid registration laws, the registration goes only to the original owner -- ownership of the guns can't be conferred without the registration, and ownership of the registration can't be conferred via probate. The problem is that means a widow or widower can't legally sell firearms belonging to the deceased spouse and is hence deprived of private property rightr (must sell the guns, usually at fire sale prices, via a dealer because they aren't legally owned -- even though the current owner has broken no laws).

Response--Your spouse will be required to turn your guns over to the police or to legally sell them to a dealer so it remains tracked. This isnt a car. Its a killing machine. It can serve no other real purpose but to fire bulletts. It needs to be tracked and those who use it need to be registered. Im sorry Trap, but I dont want your teenager to inherit your .30/.30 and then go on a shooting rampage because the kids at school call him fat.

As far as restricting the age of gun ownership, it gets into a lot of other areas. If I'm 16 and my father buys me a .22 to hunt with, can I go hunting with it? I did this in real life, not all that long ago (about 25 years). Was I as responsible then as I am today? Probably not. Did I or any of my friends get shot? No.

Response--And while the MAJORITY of kids who get a gun from daddy dont kill anyone, it is way too easy for the ones who do kill to get those guns. The Columbine killers purchased their guns at a gun show, they prepared at their parents homes. You wouldnt give your teenagers beer legally and no, you shouldnt be able to give your teen a gun either. Just look at it this way Trap, when your kid is 21 it will give your young man a great way to bond with his dad when he is an adult-there are lots of ways he can bond with you as a kid, but this will be something other than getting sh-tfaced he can do when he is 21 and it can remain a great family tradition-it just wont be something he can do with his buddies as a teenager and accidently shoot himself or his friends.

Finally, I think we have to agree that the 2nd Amendment was written for a reason -- it was about something, surely. You acknowledge that it describes an individual right. Do you think the protection of that right was designed to protect target shooters and hunters? I don't, I think it was designed to protect American citizens from tyranny by providing the with the ability to revolt should it become necessary. The flintlock musket was the assault weapon of its day in 1783. It could be loaded and fired three times a minute by an expert, far faster than any rifle. The framers of the constitution didn't ban the ownership of this purely military weapon -- they encouraged it (read some of the state constitutions written at the time of the U.S. Constitution). The idea was that a combination of weapons and superior numbers would make the population a strong bastion against militarily imposed tyrrany. They let the citizens have weapon parity with the military. It's why there's opposition to framing the argument about "assault weapons" (which really aren't assault weapons) or machine guns, versus hunting and target weapons. The 2nd Amendment was designed to protect one or the other of those types -- which do you think it was?

Response--As you have seen in this thread, the amendment was so open that we can argue it allows private ownership of nukes. At the time it was written, there was no tax in the USA, so the military was fairly dependent on the donation of your time and your personal weapons-the militia really was the army in many ways. As I pointed out, that same weapon was also often a major part of getting your daily meals-hunting was all but essential to living. It is doubtful they envisioned the world with the kinds of weapons we have today-they lived in a world where cannon were the greatest WMD and a group of people with simple rifles and flintlocks were an actual threat to a potentially tyrranical government-therefore the gun was seen as an essential aspect of getting food and one easily used also to prevent the government from abusing its power. In reality I doubt the 2nd amendment was about gun ownership so much as the ability to legally possess weapons--many governments had already disarmed their populations (like Czarist Russia) and the result was clearly tyrrany AND poverty (no real hunting-just farming). The founding fathers were most likely not considering gun nuts and the NRA style concepts--day to day survival was more dependent on guns and there was little chance of a VA Tech or Columbine--you were too busy working in the fields to worry about shooting up your school (idle hands and all being the issue today)

To put it plainly Trap, our government must always be afraid of its population but it was also made by that same population-we need to trust it somewhat. Checks and balances in our political system make it hard to ram laws down our throats and while Bush may have abused power a lot, I will admit that his abuse may well have made the people of this country begin to open their eyes again to our responsibilities in terms of voting and of paying attention to politics. We have a great country and a great political system which lets us change leaders and laws at our decision--you cant really hope for something better than that politically-so yes, have a reasonable means of self defense, but dont prepare for the death squads as if you lived in Iraq. No family needs machine guns and dozens of small arms these days.

Good sharing thoughts with you.

RML