It's not a straw man argument to say that the Founding Fathers didn't guarantee everyone the ability to purchase as many weapons as they want, or to limit the types that can be bought. This is exactly the position of the NRA. You may or may not support this philosophy, but the NRA does. They appear to believe that any restriction, no matter how slight, and no matter what the rationale, is an unreasonable infringement on the second Amendment.
I think this is overstating things; I believe the NRA crafted a compromise with Democrats in the 90s for a background check bill and I'm pretty sure they support a lot of what you and I would bother consider to be very basic, common sense regulations. Certainly not as many as you do, and probably not even as a many as I do, but not
none.
But more importantly, it's a straw man because it has nothing to do with the thing you were replying to. If you want to reply to something I said, why would you start addressing the NRA mid-paragraph without even mentioning them? I wouldn't reply to someone saying something moderate about welfare and suddenly start arguing against communism.
They can keep an eye on him. They can interrogate him. They can do a lot more than what was done in this case, which was nothing.
Well sure, they
can, but I'm asking what they should do under the hypothetical law changes you want to make. Should it be illegal to buy ammunition in bulk? Should everyone who buys more than X number of bullets be tracked and/or interrogated? And if the limit is, say, 1,000, what's to stop people from making multiple purchases of 999? And do you think it's feasible to track and interrogate anyone who does these things?
This guy bought bomb making equipment, 6,000 rounds of ammunition, 4 weapons, equipment that would be more appropriate for a SWAT officer than a civilian, and none of this behavior aroused suspicion or altered authorities. All of it, with the exception of actually making the bombs, was legal. There's something wrong with that.
If someone were monitoring his entire life, then sure, it looks extremely wrong. But the individual elements, by themselves, don't amount to much. It looks awful when the guy's life is put under a microscope for all of society to see, but making these connections beforehand is nearly impossible without draconian levels of surveillance and restriction. The guy you buy a ski mask from is different from the guy you buy the bulletproof vest from, and both are different from the people who know you enough to suspect you may be unstable.
I think this is a fair point. I may have been too quick to generalize on this. At the same time, statistics show that a person is a lot more likely to kill their loved one coming home late from a party than they are an intruder. Accidental gun deaths happen all the time. And, given that gun ownership doesn't require any kind of gun safety training, or test to ensure that the person who has the gun knows how to operate one, it probably is a lot more likely that someone in this situation would be careless and lacking in ability to wield a firearm than it is that the individual would be a former Marine with excellent marksmanship.
I've definitely heard the statistics about accidental gun deaths, and they're an important part of the debate. You didn't mention any specifically, which is fine, but it means I can only respond general. And generally, there are usually two fairly large problems with them. The first is that they usually count suicides. If someone wants to argue that we need gun control to stop people from killing themselves, they can, but that's a tougher argument to make, and I don't think we can call suicides "accidental" deaths for the purposes of this argument.
The second is that measuring accidental deaths versus intruder deaths misses things like injuries or merely scaring someone off, both of which are a big part of the benefit, whatever it might be.
Now, it may be that the numbers still make accidental deaths more common. But we need much better statistics to make these sorts of claims.
What evidence do we have that this is the case? Your scenario is at least as hypothetical as mine. People like this, who do these kinds of mass shootings are not rationale actors. It's very unlikely that they would be scared away by someone brandishing their weapon and would cower in fear at the sight of a gun.
Yes, my example is definitely hypothetical. I'm not saying we should pretend it would have happened; we don't know. I'm only mentioning it to say that, if we're going to engage in hypotheticals, we can engage in positive ones as well as negative ones, with as much validity.
These are very determined individuals who are quite willing to risk their own safety to carry out these crimes.
Exactly. Which is why I'm skeptical that gun control laws would do much to deter them.
The ability to not purchase a weapon lawfully that could fire 60 bullets in one minute may not have prevented Holmes from carrying out his plans, but it is very likely that it would dramatically have reduced the casualties he would have been able to inflict. That's a valuable thing to do. We may not be able to prevent these shootings, though if law enforcement were altered as I have outlined to suspicious activity, we may be able to do a lot more than you realize, but we can certainly reduce the number of casualties that are inflicted. A handgun which can only shoot one bullet at a time is bound to kill a lot fewer people, and take much longer to do it than a quasi-machine gun.
That is entirely possible. If he's determined to do it, it might just force him to use pipe bombs instead. And then maybe in some alternative universe we're having a conversation about not selling fertilizer without a license. And maybe he just buys the gun illegally, instead. We can only speculate. But sure, it's entirely plausible that that sort of restriction could have slowed him down some.
How is it difficult to apply a licensing regime for the purchase of a gun? We do this for cars. The same principle can apply to gun ownership and should. Do you agree or disagree with this?
I didn't say it was difficult. I said I was skeptical as to how it would be applied, which means I think it would be easy to abuse and make highly restrictive.
Lots of ideas are good in theory, but become less so in practice. The fear of many gun owners, I think, is not so much the idea of just banning assault weapons, but the idea of opening the door to a lot more.
It is also not difficult to ban assault weapons. This can also be done quite easily, or to ensure that there is sufficient coordination between agencies that someone with a diagnosed mental illness would show up on a background check. What do you disagree with that I've outlined, and what in your view makes it not possible to implement in practice?
Experience. Mexico has one legal gun shop in the entire country, and it is absolutely
flooded with guns. Washington D.C. has a huge murder problem, and has an outright ban on guns, if I recall correctly.
There are, of course, all sorts of potential explanations, even a few that gun control advocates might reasonably claim. I can think of a few I would argue from the other side. But there's enough there to wonder how plausible outright bans really are.
I don't have any problem with banning gun ownership for people with mental illnesses. I'm a little wary of how easy it might be to get something defined as a "mental illness," however. But in theory I agree with it.