LogFAQs > #973044385

Ozmose posted...

Pretty simple. Most of them sit in a 600lb safe unless they're going to the range with me. The only one that stays out is my carry gun. They're never unattended.

Then as far as I'm concerned, you're probably good. Maybe throw in some regular mental health checkups to make sure it's still safe for you to own them, but otherwise you're already doing everything I would expect to see mandated by reasonable gun control laws and I wouldn't expect much to change for you beyond maybe having some extra paperwork to fill out.

As much as people like to harp on the "making guns illegal won't stop criminals from getting them" point, the fact of the matter is that virtually every illegal gun was legally purchased at some point. If a gun is owned illegally, it's either because a legal owner sold it illegally or because it was stolen from a legal owner. The former is addressed by a more robust registration and tracking system, allowing any illegal weapons found to be traced back to their last legal owner so that person can held accountable for illegally selling them. The latter is addressed by more robust secure storage requirements, preventing any but the most dedicated thieves from being able to steal and distribute guns (hypothetically, if somebody drove a semi into your house and grabbed your safe with a forklift, they could get your guns, but obviously you can't be expected to defend against something like that) and allowing negligent owners to be held accountable for failing to keep their gun under control.

Toss in more robust background checks on every purchase, mental health screening, and a mandatory waiting period (which helps more with suicide, but also cuts down on impulsive crimes of passion), and you've got what most people mean by "common sense gun control." It's not about banning guns, it's about enacting regulations that help prevent guns from falling into the hands of people who would do wrong with them. By the sounds of things, you're already compliant with those sensible control measures and nobody needs to take any action against your guns. That's great. Not everyone is so responsible, though, and that's a major component of the gun violence problem the US has.

Ozmose posted...

Joking aside, I think the greater benefit of the death penalty is that society isn't forced to support the worst of the worst. It makes my stomach turn thinking my hard earned tax dollars are paying for the food and healthcare of some multiple child murderer somewhere.

You've probably ended up putting more tax dollars toward directly murdering children than toward supporting child murderers, given how expensive the military is compared to feeding somebody in prison. More than that, though, life sentences are in fact cheaper than the death penalty, something that's never going to be escapable so long as there's any interest in preventing the execution of innocent people (which there really needs to be), and they're arguably less humane given how soul-suckingly pointless a life in prison is, so I wouldn't get too hung up on it.

Count_Drachma posted...

The USA doesn't have a gun problem, it has a violence problem. That same guy could've been using an axe, machete, or even a bow & arrow.

And guns pretty consistently make that violence worse than it would have been otherwise because they're so much better at killing people. Case in point: If you're going to carry a weapon for everyday self-defense, you're not going to carry an axe, machete, or bow & arrow.