If they inherited a car or bought one from a friend, wouldn’t they need a driver’s license before they could drive it on public roads? And if they had a medical or psychiatric condition that precluded getting a license, wouldn’t that be analogous to gifting a gun to someone who shouldn’t be able to get a firearms license? We do it all the time for cars, why not guns?
To be honest, this Canadian finds the US gun culture baffling. It seems to me common sense flies out the door in the US when it comes to guns.
While I have no particular love for guns and don’t own one or want one, I do live in a rural farming area and recognize that some folks need them for pest control; lots of coyotes and foxes and chicken farming locally. I myself have lost three cats to coyotes.
Moreover many poorer people in our area hunt and get several months’ supply of meat from venison; this was the case with our former babysitter. We have a huge deer infestation that has wreaked havoc on our roads and cost lives. So I do recognize that for guns. I have no need for one though and have no plans for one. On the other hand, one of my sons does summer work in the field in grizzly country, to pay his way through university, so there is always a loaded rifle on his crew. It’s not just law enforcement or the military that need guns.
Yet my son, on that same crew, drives heavy-duty pickup trucks. The truck is registered, he is properly licensed, and he required proper safety and first aid training to be team lead in bush work.
So why on earth do Americans (and not a few Canadians) reject reasonable measures to register firearms and prove the competence and mental stability of those who wish to acquire them legally? Yes it’s true criminals mainly use stolen or contraband arms, but they also use stolen vehicles, yet nobody suggests we shouldn’t register motor vehicles.
There is no constitutional right to drive a car. There are zillions of cases saying that’s a “privilege”, to be granted or not granted by the state, not a “right”.
It sounds to me as if Canadians trust their government a good deal more than Americans trust ours. When true constitutional rights in this country are sought to be abridged significantly by government, it raises suspicion that some administration or other will, by one device or another, make it nearly impossible to exercise the right. As mentioned before, look at the situation of the Little Sisters of the Poor. They didn’t want to participate in contraceptive and abortifacient coverage, so the administration sued them to make them do it. If a previously unquestioned right of conscience brings the weight of the government down on you, why should we trust it not to treat other rights the same way?
I recall John Stossel’s comment on how difficult it was for him to get a gun permit in New York, despite the fact that he receives death threats. N.Y. doesn’t make it “impossible” to have a gun, just so difficult that it’s nearly impossible. And yet, criminals in New York have guns. They always will. If they can bring tons of drugs into this country, they can bring guns.
As to the mentally ill, what level of mental illness do you want to use in order to prevent people from having guns? If a woman has an inborn serotonin uptake deficiency and takes Prozac for it, does she get to have a gun or not? If a person takes Wellbutrin for depression, does he? If a person is diagnosed with a borderline personality disorder, what about him? A schizophrenic who takes his meds religiously? A bipolar who takes hers? What about an obsessive-compulsive whose seeming only issue is folding his underwear in a particular way?
It’s already the law in a number of states, including mine, that a person convicted of a felony or even domestic assault can’t have a gun.
I don’t particularly doubt there are people who should not have guns because of mental disease or defect. But one wonders, in thinking about the non-terrorist shooters, whether the real answer is their being under custody in a mental institution. Unfortunately, because of a very liberal view of civil rights, almost nobody who needs it is actually institutionalized.
We all know there are about a million people on the “no fly list”, one of whom was Ted Kennedy at one time. How did they get there? Nobody seems to know, or admit to it. What we do know is that Janet Napolitano would have put all prolifers on a “terrorist watch list”, and might have done it for all we know. One of the present proposals is to ban gun ownership to all people on that list. Because of “political correctness”, its composition can’t be based on actual likelihoods, so we probably end up with more prolifers on it than people whose profile would never let them fly El Al.
It’s really about trust, or lack thereof. The Second Amendment is about trust and distrust. The constitution itself is about trust and distrust.
Personally, I don’t trust this administration for anything at all. If, as courts have ruled, it violates the constitution with regularity, why trust it with more power?
