Quote:Well that's the thing isn't it.  You have to come up with laws that would help keep guns out of the hands of bad guys.


The old "If you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns" saying is fair, but a tad inaccurate.  First, most people don't want to outright ban guns.  Australia for example doesn't outlaw guns.  People own them for various reasons in Australia.  I can understand not wanting UK Gun laws.  They go a bit far, and it'd never go over well here.


You're never going to completely eliminate bad guys having guns.  That's why I'm not for outlawing them!  But we need to make it harder for bad guys to get guns.  John Allen Muhammed bought his sniper rifle in a gun store.  He would have failed the background check, and if the gun store complied, they wouldn't have sold him that rifle.  Now, you can argue that he'd have bought it on the black market.  And that's certainly possible.  I'm not going to argue that it isn't.


The idea however is -- it won't be as easy.  Getting access to the black market isn't always so easy.  And it's often more expensive.  People say that criminals don't follow laws.  But that's not precisely true.  They do follow laws.  They just don't follow all of them.  For that matter many criminals don't plan on becoming criminals.  They don't think to themselves "You know what, I think I'm going to be a criminal."  When getting a gun is easy for them, they're going to make that choice.  And how about the black market's ability to get arms to sell?  If we make that harder, the guns will be even more expensive.


And then you have the mental health aspect of it all.  Should Adam Lanza's mother have kept a gun in her house, when her son had mental problems?  Maybe.  But she should have at the very least kept it locked safely away from him.  


What we need are laws that actually protect the innocent people, and make it harder for bad guys to get guns.  We can't come up with laws that would help, without people actively talking about ways to reduce gun violence.  


I don't want to take guns away from you.  You're not a criminal, and I presume you never plan on using them unless in defense of yourself, your family, or your property.  I want to make it harder for the bad guys to get them.  I want to make it harder for mentally ill people to get a hold of them.  Because there are people who shouldn't have guns.  And those aren't the law abiding citizens like you.  They're the ones who don't know the first thing about gun safety.