Debate about Gun Control

[Bob Butler 54]

(02-16-2017, 03:32 PM)TeacherinExile Wrote: We have paid an increasingly bitter and bloody price for the Second Amendment.  When I learned of the massacre of small children at Sandy Hook, I cried.  Wept for the innocent children, their parents, indeed for the country.  And when Congress--which the NRA pretty much owns lock, stock, and barrel--couldn't even summon the moral courage to pass a simple gun control measure in response, well, I knew that we were through the looking glass as a society.  If our Founding Fathers were alive today to survey the aftermath of any of the venues where mass shootings have taken place, I can't help but feel they would shake their heads in Prufrockian dismay, and say, "This is not what we meant at all."

Yes, you can quite sincerely project your personal values on the Founding Fathers. Have you done any real reading on their times? In their day, massacres were generally natives coming out of the woods for a hit and run raid. There were no police forces. There wasn't much in the way of a standing army, certainly nothing that could respond to a massacre in a timely fashion. Yep, aggressors with guns are a problem. Unfortunately, what is often required is more aggressors with guns, armed, trained, and willing to take that elevator to the top of the tower, sooner rather than later. The Founding Fathers did what they could given the culture as it was to make sure the law abiding were in a position to do just that.

What law would you pass that would have changed Sandy Hook? The perpetrator was mentally unstable. One approach that might have made a difference would have been tight screening by psychologists of everyone with access to weapons. The goal would be to prove lack of mental competence to the degree required to strip a constitutional right? Are you aware of the legal standards required to do that? Can you guess how many psychologists would have to be screening people to stop a potential Sandy Hook?

If this isn't your approach, what is? It is one thing to state emotional distress at the status quo. Lots of people, including myself, are unhappy with the status quo. It is another thing to have a proposal that might actually help and might possibly be passed.