House passes bill to expand background checks for gun sales

[pbrower2a]

(06-01-2022, 04:48 PM)nguyenivy Wrote:

(05-27-2022, 06:03 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: In my opinion, the firearms industry should be nationalized so that it can no longer offer blood money to those politicians who put campaign funds above human life. We also need a mandatory buy-back of all automatic and semi-automatic firearms  even if such brings a profit to the seller.

Nationalisation of the firearms industry may also pave the way to look at other industries that adversely affected human life that are privatised (think of the Texas electrical grid in early 2021, for instance). In the UK they once had nationalised railways but once they were privatised service quality dropped while prices rose and services were cut in the name of profit. From what I understand the public there (except maybe the pro-Brexit people) at this point would be mostly for re-nationalising it. From our S&H viewpoint, isn't a 4T/1T era generally a time when the public would be more open to government playing a bigger role in our lives?

I'd exclude the hunting rifles. Sport hunters are well-behaved people, which I cannot say about people who own their own arsenals for protecting their drug trafficking or to sate their fantasies, including "race war". (As far as the neo-Nazis who want their "Racial Holy War" they can go to Hell with their models). 

The legitimate sales of most weapons are to government agencies, especially to the police and military, and it is best that those weapons go only to those agencies. The not-so-legitimate sales to practically anyone who wants one of those killing machines is of course extremely suspect. 

This is not a huge industry as are petroleum and motor vehicles, in case anyone thinks of socialist enterprise a viable means of stopping AGW, which will kill millions if unabated, especially if the life-threatening stresses such as famines and geographic dislocations (I expect there to still be hundreds of millions of peasant farmers sixty to eighty years rom now in time for the next Crisis Era, and many of those could find their livelihoods disappearing under the rising seas or under the sands of expanding deserts... while the food supply shrinks catastrophically for everyone else. Zero population growth is more critical and necessary than is rationing of energy and vehicle use. Buying out the weapons manufacturing would be far less expensive, and more an unmixed boon, than buying out the oil and vehicle businesses that have far greater cost to acquire. 

Were I President of Venezuela I would contemplate selling Petroleos Venezolanos to support a social welfare system, much as former Socialist states with their nationalized industries. Marxist socialism may not be as valid a means of organizing an economy as is a social market state. Human happiness is an objective, and progress to some political ideal must be subordinate to that happiness. Venezuela is a miserable place to live under Chavez and Maduro. Markets force rational behavior, and rational behavior solves more problems than does government ownership and operation of the economy.