View original postYou have no Constitutional right to drive a car. You have no Constitutional right to a lot of things. But we do have a Second Amendment and it permits the right to bear arms. Limiting guns to people under 21 is not unreasonable and would almost certainly pass muster if a Federal law were enacted to that effect. Limiting access if the person is a convicted felon would probably also pass muster if narrowly construed and containing protections that would permit removing the restriction in some circumstances. You're never going to get guns out of the hands of criminals, though. They get illegal guns now already anyway.
Obviously if you're talking about people in the mafia, MS-13, other established violent gangs, yes, they won't be all that bothered and their share of the gun casualty statistics won't be much, if at all, affected by such measures. But there's also loads of people committing violent crimes without having access to such groups, for whom illegally obtaining a gun is not impossible but at least very difficult and greatly increasing the odds of them appearing on the radar of law enforcement before they can actually carry out the intended crime. And then there's the people committing impulsive violent gun crimes with almost no prior preparation, who probably would still have resorted to violence in those situations even if they hadn't owned a gun, but it would've been much less likely to be fatal.
View original postYou have to keep the restrictions carefully tailored to avoid too much discretion on the part of the government. Not letting "depressed people" get guns, for example, would be a non-starter.
Yes - reducing gun suicides is a tough one and any plausible measures would really just be about making it just a bit harder, making it require just a bit more preparation to commit suicide, and in so doing bringing down the numbers a bit. But then, that's kind of the whole point of the article.
Surprise, a progressive editorial on reducing gun violence that's reasonable! (long)
- 25/01/2023 08:09:04 PM
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Too Long Will Read
- 25/01/2023 11:40:02 PM
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It is long but worth reading.
- 26/01/2023 12:29:48 AM
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Tornado News (I am not supposed to get these in Texas, says the former Kansas-ian)
- 27/01/2023 12:10:17 AM
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Some of this is reasonable, but remember: you have no Constitutional right to a dog
- 26/01/2023 06:49:47 PM
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But 'criminals' are not a homogeneous group.
- 26/01/2023 08:11:42 PM
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Bullshit. This is incredibly intellectually dishonest.
- 27/01/2023 08:53:42 PM
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You amuse me
- 28/01/2023 12:38:13 AM
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You bewilder me
- 28/01/2023 12:34:42 PM
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a valid point
- 28/01/2023 05:15:31 PM
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Nothing
- 31/01/2023 12:58:31 AM
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Hands off the John Bircher Society
- 01/02/2023 02:46:10 AM
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Less government, more responsibility and with God's help, a better world. *NM*
- 01/02/2023 12:31:08 PM
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