GeorgiaDon

I'd handle the situation the same way. Councilman24 seems to feel differently. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

Unfortunately your deliberately highly inflammatory presentation makes it unlikely that any meaningful discussion of any of the points you raise will follow. FWIW I agree that the abandonment/destruction of two-parent families is a source of many problems. Unlike you I don't blame that on "liberals". I put much of the blame on the war on drugs and other institutionalized mechanisms that end up placing a large proportion of the African-American male urban population in prison or under supervision of the judicial system. In many ways those laws were an outgrowth of earlier Jim Crow attempts to "control" the "black" population. I do not think it was "liberals" who pushed for these laws, nor are "liberals" the prime beneficiaries of the prisonocracy. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

An Atlanta police officer has just been charged with felony murder for doing exactly that. I think he should be charged with attempted murder, or at a minimum aggravated assault. Not charging him sends a very loud message that such behavior is acceptable. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

So, are you are saying that if I am minding my own business in a public area and I am approached by an unknown person brandishing a gun I should feel compelled to obey them as if they had the same legal authority as a police officer? Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

It's not that hard, Ron. Open your mind enough to really look at what political parties and people stand for, instead of blindly assuming only Republicans represent the shining light on the hill. You don't have to follow anyone just because they put an "R" behind their name. Look at actions and policies and ask who is more aligned with Christian values. Did Jesus refuse to heal the sick unless they were rich? Did He turn away people because they were foreigners? Did He condemn the poor if they asked for a piece of bread? Why do you worship a party that supports all of these actions? Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

Gingrich has repeatedly demonstrated that he has no moral or ethical compass other than to do/say what is in his own self-interest. He is also an outrageous and unapologetic hypocrite, leading the effort to impeach Clinton at the same time that he was carrying on an adulterous affair. Indeed he shares a lot of personality traits with Trump, including narcissism. It's interesting that you look so favorably on such people. It makes me question your own supposed "Christian" values. Surely if the conservative movement had any value it could find champions who were not such odious piles of excrement? Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

So you think those draft dodgers would had fled to Canada even if the US was not involved in Vietnam? Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

Frontline recently ran an excellent documentary on the rise of ISIS. Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby deliberately ignored CIA warnings about ISIS founder Zarqawi and passed on several opportunities to eliminate him, so they could try to use him to press their "intuition" (=a belief held in contradiction of all the available facts) that Saddam Hussein was working in concert with Bin Laden. Their efforts to strong-arm CIA analysts was reprehensible, and the speech they wrote for Colin Powell to give at the UN was filled with wholly made-up "intelligence" intended to show Zarqawi was the go-between connecting Iraq to Al-Quaida. This deliberate inflation of Zarqawi's significance, done to provide political justification for the invasion of Iraq, raised Zarqawi's reputation to the point he was able to recruit the insurgency that eventually became ISIS, while killing hundreds of US soldiers and thousands of Iraqi civilians along the way. As the insurgency grew, Donald Rumsfeld and others in the administration refused to act, indeed denied that suicide bombings were even happening (despite obvious evidence to the contrary), because it contradicted the narrative that Iraq would welcome the American presence. Bush may or may not have been a dupe, but Cheney, Scooter Libby, and Donald Rumsfeld are truly evil. They could not have been a better ally of Zarqawi and ISIS if they had tried. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

That is because you are looking at the issue emotionally and not logically. Derek V Out of curiosity, how many dead people are OK with you? How many crippled? I realize "0" is not a realistic number, but what is, in your "logical" mind? BTW I think it's interesting that you agreed the DUI laws were not a good proxy for laws related to the use of guns to commit crime, yet you keep on bringing up that same argument. What's up with that? Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

Hook, Thanks for the civil discussion. I do believe we all want to see a solution to the problem, even though we may disagree on what the elements of that solution might be. Of course none of us are in a position to make laws/policy, so likely all of this has been a typical internet waste of time, but maybe something of value might come just from having a rational back-and-forth. Cheers, Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

A while ago (post 277) I discussed why DUIs are not a good model to compare to using guns to commit felonies. You didn't respond. At the risk of wasting bandwidth, I'll repeat those reasons here: "Education and enforcement worked to the extent that it did for DUI because the target audience was largely people like us**: people for whom a DUI conviction would have major negative consequences. At one time drunk driving was seen as not a very serious offense. "One more for the road" was something almost everybody accepted as normal. Education and penalties changed the dynamic. Now a DUI conviction could result in severe financial penalties and suspension of your driver's license at best, at worst jail time. Multiple offenses certainly will result in jail time. For most of us, losing your license and being put in jail (so you can't go to work) results in loss of your job. In my case it would mean throwing away a career for which I spent 12 years in University. Without a job, I will certainly lose the house and property I have invested many years in. The penalty I would pay would go far beyond the mere fine/sentence the court would impose, it could include everything I have worked for all my life. Since I have a lot to lose, so you can be sure I keep a close eye on my alcohol consumption. I am sure the same is true of the great majority of the population. For such people, education about penalties (in other words, deterrence) is an excellent tool. Now lets look at your average armed robber or drug dealer. Young, male, poorly educated. No job, no house to lose. Likely belongs to a social group (or gang) where everybody has pretty much the same lifestyle. Violence is an everyday human interaction. Nobody gives much thought to the future, nobody expects to live very long. Going to prison is no big deal, it happens to everybody. Some even find a measure of safety in prison, compared to life on the street. Deterrence has no meaning in that context. Here in Georgia, felons found in possession of a firearm are prosecuted. The penalty is one to five years in prison, and that time (which averages towards the 5 year end of the scale) is served in full. Using a firearm during the commission of a felony adds five years to the sentence on top of the sentence for the underlying felony. Everybody knows this. Criminals simply do not care. We have tried education and deterrence for years and it has no effect on the target audience, the career thugs and criminals. The only people who are deterred are the already law-abiding. In the meantime the toll of dead, maimed, and traumatized keeps growing." Education and penalties (=deterrence) can work only when people weigh reward vs risk and decide the risk is not worth the potential reward. It is a mistake to believe that everybody weighs things the same way you (and I) do. What seems like a great risk to us (a long prison sentence + losing your career/home/retirement/social standing) is a non-issue to people who have not invested in those things, and who inhabit social groups in which it is normal/expected that they will spend years of their lives locked up. It's not that they are unaware of consequences, it's that those consequences don't seem all that bad. Also we should keep in mind that after prison they almost always return to the same communities they lived in before they went to prison, and so even if they don't plan a return to a life of crime, abiding by the law (and so being unarmed) may present much more of a risk than any prison sentence (if they are caught) ever could. Don **I choose to assume you are law abiding and self-supporting. I also assume that since you can afford to skydive you have a decent income, which means you have probably taken the time/effort to develop the skills/education needed to command a well paying job. That puts you in the group that plans for the future, takes care of your needs yourself, and otherwise are an upstanding member of society. _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

Sounds more like an issue with corrections/incarceration than firearms.What do you suggest? Torture? Cutting off hands? Gouging out eyes? Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

Education? You mean those gang-bangers are violent thugs only because nobody ever told them that was bad behavior? All we have to do is explain to them that nice people don't shoot each other over trivial incidents (taken as "disrespect") and they will see the light? Education and enforcement worked to the extent that it did for DUI because the target audience was largely people like us: people for whom a DUI conviction would have major negative consequences. At one time drunk driving was seen as not a very serious offense. "One more for the road" was something almost everybody accepted as normal. Education and penalties changed the dynamic. Now a DUI conviction could result in severe financial penalties and suspension of your driver's license at best, at worst jail time. Multiple offenses certainly will result in jail time. For most of us, losing your license and being put in jail (so you can't go to work) results in loss of your job. In my case it would mean throwing away a career for which I spent 12 years in University. Without a job, I will certainly lose the house and property I have invested many years in. The penalty I would pay would go far beyond the mere fine/sentence the court would impose, it could include everything I have worked for all my life. Since I have a lot to lose, so you can be sure I keep a close eye on my alcohol consumption. I am sure the same is true of the great majority of the population. For such people, education about penalties (in other words, deterrence) is an excellent tool. Now lets look at your average armed robber or drug dealer. Young, male, poorly educated. No job, no house to lose. Likely belongs to a social group (or gang) where everybody has pretty much the same lifestyle. Violence is an everyday human interaction. Nobody gives much thought to the future, nobody expects to live very long. Going to prison is no big deal, it happens to everybody. Some even find a measure of safety in prison, compared to life on the street. Deterrence has no meaning in that context. Here in Georgia, felons found in possession of a firearm are prosecuted. The penalty is one to five years in prison, and that time (which averages towards the 5 year end of the scale) is served in full. Using a firearm during the commission of a felony adds five years to the sentence on top of the sentence for the underlying felony. Everybody knows this. Criminals simply do not care. We have tried education and deterrence for years and it has no effect on the target audience, the career thugs and criminals. The only people who are deterred are the already law-abiding. In the meantime the toll of dead, maimed, and traumatized keeps growing. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

Sure, but we should also look at the design and implementation of the law. A law that is unenforceable or otherwise not enforced is unlikely to be successful. A law that makes it legal to sell a gun to anyone as long as you do not have prior knowledge that person is prohibited from purchasing is unlikely to have any positive benefit, because it puts the entire responsibility on the purchaser to be honest and we already know they have a criminal history. Even cases where the seller likely knew the buyer was illegal are almost impossible to prove, as you have to prove beyond doubt that the seller was aware and prove their intent to sell anyway. You can catch the buyer after the fact and punish them, which is what we already do and what you have promoted as the solution to the problem. Obviously though that is not working. First, police only become aware the felon has acquired a gun after they have used it to commit another crime, so you have to have another dead, mutilated, or traumatized victim before any action can be taken. Then you have the expense we all must bear of incarcerating the criminal. The only way such a system could work to reduce violent crime would likely be by permanently imprisoning anyone who uses a gun to commit a crime. You and I and all law-abiding people would be deterred by the prospect of a long jail term, but them we would be very unlikely to commit such a crime in the first place, due to our upbringing, social norms, and so on. Criminals, especially repeat violent criminals, for whatever reason do not seem to weigh things the same way. Long sentences, which already exist and are imposed, are not a deterrent. Going to prison is not a deterrent, rather it seems to be an expected right of passage, just part of "becoming a man". For you and I, prison would be devastating, leading (for me at least) to the permanent loss of my career, home, and social standing. Incentives that work for us are irrelevant to much of the criminal culture. So we are left with permanent incarceration, with all the financial and social costs that entails, as the only way to make a real impact via "law enforcement". Also a law that can easily be evaded, such as universal checks in one state but not adjacent states, can never work. The failure of such a law to work only proves that there are too many ways around it, not that it cannot ever work under any circumstances. I agree that there needs to be a rational case for a law to be likely to be effective before it should be passed. I don't see how magazine limits could make a significant difference (aside from Skydekker's example of a limit of 1 round, which is an obvious non-starter), and so I don't agree with such laws. Likewise I don't think banning guns because they look "scary" (so-called "assault weapons") makes sense. To me, though, a serious effort to keep guns out of the hands of people we as a society have decided cannot be trusted with them does make sense, and it is something we have not seriously tried to do. I have not been talking about mass shootings, I have been talking about the constant flood of victims produced from "ordinary" violent crime (armed robberies, home invasions, carjackings, etc). I think that mass shootings are a very different issue, perpetrated by people who are going for a high body count for whatever demented reason they imagine, not for "business" (as a criminal might look at it. Mass shootings are a very different problem, requiring different approaches that are likely very long term, but as far as I know almost every perpetrator of recent mass shootings obtained their guns legally. Even the San Bernadino shooters could have purchased their guns themselves, apparently they used a straw buyer to avoid attracting attention. I described such a system, in use in Iowa. The buyer goes to the police, has a background check, and is issued a permit to buy as many guns as they with from whomever they want, good for a year. The seller only has to ask to see the permit. If such a system was universal and sellers respected the process it could make a difference. Indeed, if it was really "universal" then a permit issued in one state could be respected in other states, so the buyer could benefit by being able to buy across state lines. You statement proves my point that the existing system cannot be enforced and cannot make a dent in violent crime. Most people including, I presume, you and I, want to avoid a criminal prosecution. A modest level of enforcement is all that would be needed. As I said before, it is illegal for bars to sell alcohol to underage patrons. Do you think bars would forego the revenue and follow the law if the police never checked to make sure they were carding customers? Of course the system would not be perfect, after all bars around here are occasionally busted for getting casual about checking ID. However most take it very seriously as they could lose their business license. Even a small chance of getting caught would be enough for the vast majority of private sellers to make the extremely modest effort to ask to see the buyer's permit and ID. It costs them nothing (except maybe the sale if the buyer does not have one) and takes perhaps one or two minutes. It is something that has not been tried, and it is rational to expect that making access to guns less convenient could have an impact on criminal activity. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

You misunderstood. That is easy to do I suppose if you read only the last reply in a long conversation. I was responding to people who argued that background checks are useless, all that is needed is more police and more people in jail to solve the gun violence problem. My question to them, and now to you, is why you believe that is true even though it has totally failed to change people's behavior regarding drug use. Had you read the whole conversation, you would know that I believe that it has to become more difficult for career criminals to get their hands on guns. Perhaps changes in policing tactics have a role there, but that is unlikely to be sufficient all on its own. Universal background checks throughout the country (not just in a couple of states which are easily evaded by buying in a neighboring state), enforced as alcohol sales laws are enforced (spot checks on sellers as well as buyers, with penalties for knowingly selling to illegal buyers) could be a part of the approach. I pointed to Iowa as an example of a possible permit system, where the buyer must obtain the permit and the seller merely has to confirm that the buyer has one. I am surprised that you would attack me for suggesting that universal background checks could have a role in keeping guns out of the hands of felons and criminals. I am pretty sure you have supported background checks on several occasions. Perhaps I was wrong, and you also feel that more cops and more prisons is all that is needed? Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

I honestly have no idea what you are talking about. Your comment has no relationship to anything I wrote. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

Even better, and a good idea. More info and less intrusive. No process could stop every crime, and mass murders by people with mental illnesses is especially difficult to predict and prevent. I am more concerned about the thugs who get out of prison and find it incredibly easy to arm themselves and resume preying on innocent victims. I don't support registration. There is no evidence that registries prevent crime, and they cost a lot and discourage lawful gun ownership, as the Canadian registry shows. I don't own that many, but my son built a shooting range on our farm and that's a lot of fun. I'm sure there are such people, but I don't know any of them. Almost everybody I know does think it is too easy for criminals to get their hands on guns. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

I'll see your commentary and raise you an actual analytical study (the one I posted before that you apparently did not read). I'll remind you that correlation does not prove causation. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

So why will it work in the parallel war on guns?I did not say that it would. I asked Hook why he thinks it will. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

The sheriffs are indeed trying to get the law overturned. Are they making nearly as much effort to determine where criminals are buying their guns? Do they even care? Perhaps more crime = bigger budgets and toys for the cops? Your second link is dead. I will ask you again. Decades of increasingly onerous laws and penalties, and massive investment in police forces and prisons has failed completely to win the "war on drugs". Why do you think this approach will suddenly bring crime with guns under control? Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

Perhaps those politicians should have to memorize this poem, though I doubt it would help much until they have to fight their wars without depending on other people's children, but rather risk their own. Don Dulce et decorum est by Wilfred Owen Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs, And towards our distant rest began to trudge. Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots, But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots Of gas-shells dropping softly behind. Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! - An ecstasy of fumbling, Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time, But someone still was yelling out and stumbling And floundering like a man in fire or lime. - Dim through the misty panes and thick green light As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. In all my dreams before my helpless sight He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, - My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori. _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

I agree with this completely. Besides raising civil liberties issues, I'm not even sure such bans are good police practice. If someone is on a "watch" list, all that should happen is that they get looked at a little more closely. If they go to a dealer and buy a gun, that sale should go through but also perhaps prompt someone to take a look and decide if they are a real threat or not, and if they are then increase surveillance and see if any real evidence materializes. If someone is denied a gun purchase for no legitimate reason, they will immediately know they are being watched. If they really are plotting something, wouldn't that just prompt them to encrypt their phone and go buy something off of Craig's List? I'm sure it's easier to keep tabs on someone if you don't make it obvious that you are watching them. I also think the "no-fly" list is idiotic. You can be pulled out of line for "enhanced screening" at random; I saw this happen to several people while waiting for a flight from Ecuador recently. If there is reason to suspect someone might be planning something on a flight, it's easy to give them a really close examination without telegraphing that they are under specific surveillance. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

***Adds an inconvenience factor and added cost to private sales, without actually having any impact of firearm related violence. In the Iowa model, the cost and inconvenience is borne by the buyer, who has a background check done by the police/sheriff who then issue a permit to buy any number of guns and good for a year (if I recall correctly). The only inconvenience to the seller is having to ask to see the permit. Rushmc also takes a photo of the permit and they buyer, which is smart but not legally required. On what basis do you say such a system could not have an impact on firearm related violence? Iowa is the only state I am aware of with such a system. Not only is the violent crime rate there low already (due to demographic factors such as small & primarily rural population), any possible benefit might also be reduced by the ease of buying in an adjacent state. The only way to test the effectiveness of universal background checks would be to apply them everywhere. I guess you could prosecute them before they illegally obtain a firearm, but that has obvious problems associated with it. People barred from owning firearms are going to obtain them. I am not saying make it easy for them. Increased police force size and budgets have been shown to be very effective in reducing firearm-related violence. Gun-control laws have been ineffective. The way forward is obvious. Spend the money, enforce the laws. Derek V Georgia (where I live) has quite strict laws regarding gun possession by felons, which are enforced, but this has not reduced the violent crime rate, at least not so you'd notice. Every evening the first 15-20 minutes of the Atlanta evening news is full of story after story of stupid senseless shootings. A few years ago two police officers were shot, and one died, at the hand of a felon who had been released from prison only a year before. This fellow (Jamie Hood, so you can google him and check my story) had no difficulty obtaining multiple handguns which he used in the course of his drug-dealing business. In addition to being convicted of murdering one officer (Buddy Christian) and wounding a second, he was convicted of murdering a city worker just to send a "message" to a friend of that victim. Where did he get his guns? No news story reported on any effort by the police to discover that, and certainly no-one was prosecuted for giving or selling him guns. Indeed it may have been perfectly legal for the seller to do business with him, as long as the seller was not aware of Mr. Hood's status as a convicted armed robber. So, what do people mean when they say "enforce the law"? If there is no background check requirement for private sales, anyone can sell to anyone. It's true the buyer has committed a crime if they are barred from possessing a firearm, but the police have no way of knowing that the transaction ever occurred. There are only a couple of ways they could find out. One would be if the buyer later committed a crime with that firearm, or at least did something dumb enough that could be stopped for probable cause. The other would be if a police officer was detailed to follow and observe every felon upon their release, for the rest of their lives. I'm sure that would be unconstitutional, not to mention prohibitively expensive. Many people believe that increased police activity suppresses crime, but that is not always easy to prove. See here for a discussion of the subject. Crime is also influenced by other factors, especially economic activity, and so it tends to cycle up and down. Typically communities will respond to periods of high crime by hiring more police, so police staffing will generally also cycle up and down, lagging behind crime by a couple of years. As a result police staffing will often increase just when crime is already peaked and starting to decrease, due to completely different factors, and it will appear that more police caused the crime to go down. This is not to say that a heavy police presence can't discourage crime, at least in local area, it just means a causal connection is not easy to prove. A problem (or so it seems to me) with the approach of a heavy police presence and strict enforcement of every law and ordinance (also known as the "broken windows" strategy) is that it tends to spawn other problems that end up being counterproductive. Such approaches are notorious for breeding unconstitutional practices such as stopping/searching people without probable cause to believe they have committed any crime. Often communities try to recoup the cost of the police staffing by creating a multitude of fineable offenses, which end up trapping especially the already poor in poverty when they are repeatedly arrested and jailed for being unable to pay hefty fines that result from "offenses" such as parking facing the wrong way on the roadside. Perhaps most insidious, entire communities end up with most of the adult male population in-and-out of jail, so kids grow up without any male parent, a situation that lends itself to future problems for those kids, especially the boys. This destruction of the two-parent family has been one of the worst effects of the so-called "war on drugs", in my opinion. Indeed, the "war on drugs" is the best example I can think of to show that strict enforcement and draconian penalties is not able to change well-established human behaviors. If that approach failed in the case of drug use, why should we expect it to work for people who have already shown their predisposition towards violent crime? I'm not saying that there is not a place for intelligent, community-oriented policing, there obviously is. I do think the problem is too big and complicated for simplistic solutions, such as overwhelming police presence, and the cost might be worse than the cure in many places. It needs to become much more difficult to buy a gun without a background check, I think, and that requires enforcement on both the buyer and the seller (as exists with alcohol sales). There needs to be a much higher level of trust between communities and their police, so the "code of silence" disappears and police can get the information they need to solve a higher percentage of violent crimes. I think we should also reconsider some of the life-long consequences of a felony conviction. It doesn't make sense to me to bar felons from many kinds of jobs, for life, if we expect them to stay away from future crime. In Georgia, felons cannot ever work at any career that requires a state license, such as teacher, contractor, or even a barber or beautician, even if the job has no relation to their crime. I also think felons should be able to have their voting and second amendment rights restored, if they can go a period of time (say, 5 years) without re-offending. Providing an opportunity to work, and an incentive to stay on the right side of the law, could go some way towards reducing the pressures that tend to steer felons back towards crime. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

Plan A: make it more difficult for legally barred people (felons, people under court or restraining orders, seriously mentally ill) to obtain guns by requiring a background check on every purchase, and by prosecuting people who sell without the background check. Downside: adds an inconvenience factor to private sales. Plan B: wait until legally barred people obtain a gun and use it to commit a violent crime. Then prosecute them and jail them forever. Downside: dead or maimed victims are a prerequisite before action is taken. Significant cost of incarcerating people for extended periods. Significant cost associated with indigent defense. Social and financial costs associated with significantly larger, more intrusive police presence and control. Obviously, plan B is much better! Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

I've said before that I like that approach, and I'll add that it does not bother me that no paperwork goes to the government. I see no need for a registry, indeed the Canadian experience is that registries are a waste of money that do not solve crimes and only discourages lawful ownership. Enforcement of such a requirement, or indeed any law regarding background checks for private gun sales, could be enforced the same way age restrictions on alcohol sales are enforced, with occasional "buys" by undercover officers, and severe penalties for violating the law. A credible risk of being caught and punished is all that would be required, not an absolute certainty. As it is, the police make no effort at all to identify and prosecute people who knowingly sell firearms to prohibited buyers. Of course such laws are "unenforceable" if the police decide not to enforce them. Does anyone think bar owners would refuse to sell to underage patrons if nobody every bothered to check on them? There is no way to prevent every mass shooting, and no easy way to prevent many of them without crapping on medical privacy laws. If seeking help for a mental illness exposes you to public "outing", such as reporting to courts, government agencies, local gun shops, maybe your employer, then no-body would ever seek such help, and it's likely the problem would be worse than it already is. Anyway, mass shootings such as school shootings or the Colorado theater incident are horrific but very rare. A much larger toll is attributable to the ready flow of guns to criminals and people with restraining orders against them. Until it becomes difficult for such people to get their hands on a gun, the carnage will continue. I find it amazing that so many people are unwilling to make the smallest effort to make that happen, for fear that they will be personally inconvenienced. Instead they raise the false flag that such laws are unenforceable (because they work to block any enforcement), or claim that such efforts are not worthwhile because they won't prevent every single murder (otherwise known as "making the perfect the enemy of the good"). Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)