I always hate these type of thought experiments (nothing personal) for it assumes good faith.

Yet we can also make minor changes of our current system that will be successful if we assume good faith.

For example if you have a history of X the actual government puts you on a waiting list before you are allowed to buy a gun, and they do an investigation. Likewise a history of domestic abuse, police phone calls, etc could be compiled.

BUT NO ONE LIKES THAT, for assembling such a list assumes Bad Faith exists in the world and we are already at the point we do not trust one another. We have problems of the "inside / outside" where we trust most people in this world with good faith, but we do not trust all people, and we do not trust various methods of "surveillance" and "intermediaries" to gain information and this information will be used for "policing."

We do not want minors who go to Juvie to have a criminal record after they are 18 or after they are 25 or some other arbitrary number. Likewise we do not trust when a mother, grandmother, girlfriend, ex-girlfriend, etc calls the police and says they feel scared in this moment for the man was in a really bad headspace (perhaps drunk or depression or dozens of other things) and the women literally called for what she thought was her safety and now there is a red flag trigger in the background check, etc, etc.

-----

Thus we imagine an ideal father, an ideal system, a mandatory service. This ideal space will have a rupture and via the rupture we will teleport from one place to another place, and we now trust and invest this new system to do all the data tracking, all the surveillance, all the policing to do the background check we are afraid to do now via slight modifications of the current system.

-----

We do not trust the system, we do not trust the name of the father. I am going to borrow other peoples words here, but I felt these two other people hit on something. (with slight modifications)

Person 1: "laws can't do anything to keep powerful weapons out of the hands of the public yet simultaneously the state also has the capacity to create good fathers and transform the spiritual lives of its citizens"

Person 2: (in response) "The unconscious desire for a lawful Father overriding every contingency is very powerful, from where I sit." ... "yet this fantasy is also the unconscious disavowal, is also a disavowal of living actual fathers—not the one created in the image of a God."

Put another way we retreat to fantasy for we feel the present is unbearable, we do not think we can change the unbearable present, so only via the retreat to fantastical (aka things that are so unlikely to happen) can we fill whole again. Via retreating to fantasy we can provide the cathartic relief, the relief of our strong emotions we feel fervently inside. :disapprove

Yes I am FUN at parties!

I have not been following this closely but there is a current Supreme Court case which will be the first major gun case in the last decade and it will come out in the next month. It is actually challenging everything Mookie said 2 posts ago. Note the whole article but here is 2 paragraphs since it is paywalled

The case: Can New York place severe restrictions on who can carry a gun in public? (New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen)

For 108 years, New York has said that anyone who wants to carry a gun in public must apply for a license, and he or she must be at least 21, have no criminal record, have “good moral character” and — this is the part really being challenged — a demonstrated need to carry the gun beyond average public safety fears. This is known as “proper cause.”

Two men from Upstate New York challenged the state’s law when they applied to carry a gun at all times but received allowances only for hunting or going to and from work. They sued, arguing the strict law violated their Second Amendment rights to “keep and bear arms.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/05/19/supreme-court-gun-case/

Who knows what this current 9 justices will do shrug