[wittynickname]

Originally Posted by llwhiteoutll

Pretty much. All the crimes that are committed with gun are already illegal. The money that is spent on trying to restrict access by law abiding citizens would be better spent on mental health awareness/treatment and stopping root causes of crimes. The fact that someone makes the decision to commit a crime is the issue, not the means by which it is committed.

Also, someone will call that an assault rifle soon.

1) Not everyone who shoots another person is crazy. Some of them have a quick, hot temper, and in the heat of the moment they take another person's life. These are not always criminals, plenty of these people are "law abiding citizens."
2) What of the idea of a law requiring a mental health examination before obtaining access to a gun? That addresses the issue of mental health awareness while still allowing "law abiding citizens" to get firearms, they just have to jump through another hoop.

Originally Posted by llwhiteoutll

The root cause of suicides and most of the mass shootings is probably lack of diagnosis, treatment and support for people struggling with mental health issues.

What about the root cause of accidental deaths from firearms? Or a man who thinks his wife is cheating and takes out her and the guy he thinks she's cheating with? Mental health diagnoses aren't going to stop Heat Of The Moment crimes, nor are they going to keep someone's 4 year old from finding a gun and killing themselves or a friend/sibling/cousin.

I don't think anyone would have an issue with the police or government putting a program in place that takes guns out of the hands of criminals and off the streets. The problem is that you can't legislate guns away from criminals, who by definition would not follow a ban or restrictions place on firearms by a law.

But if you require legal weapons to be annually registered to a specific owner--if that weapon goes missing, let's make a law that punishes the person if that weapon is later used in a crime. If you can't properly store and lock up your weapons and it ends up on the street--you're part of the problem, obviously, so you should face some sort of fine or penalty.

That helps keep guns with their legal owners, because if you're going to be fined for being careless with your weapon, far fewer weapons are going to end up on the streets with people who aren't legal owners.

If all the effort that goes into trying to restrict a magazine capacity or making something harder to get because it's black and has a pistol grip went into taking guns away from criminals, it would do a lot more good. Because at the end of the day, the only person who is impacted by a law requiring a mag to be pinned at 10 instead of 15 or 17 is the law abiding citizen, the criminal with the same gun doesn't care about that law and the fact that it is illegal won't affect his decision to use a "prohibited" magazine.

If all the effort that goes into whining about whether or not a semi-automatic weapon is an assault rifle or not went into instead concocting logical, sane, basic gun control laws, none of this would be an issue.

Registration, mental health checks, education on how to use/clean firearms, laws about storage, etc. None of these ideas are going to keep weapons away from law abiding citizens, but they'd all go a long way in preventing a whole lot of the gun crime that plagues the US in ways it doesn't plague other first world nations.

The problem is that there is no right to "feel safe" in a public place. Imagine trying to legislate that, it would be impossible since you can't define "feeling safe" for 100% of the population.

And yet there are "stand your ground" laws which basically give a citizen a license to kill if they feel their life is threatened in any way.

There is a "right to happiness" in the US, and I can safely say that stronger gun laws would make me feel a whole lot safer, and thus, happier.