A634.8.3.RB_HallMike

Oh gun control.  How such a topic can become such a heated argument is really beyond me.  I think the answer to gun control is pretty simple and can satisfy those that want restrictions and those that want unabated access to any weapon on the market.

Pure and simple, the Constitution is a modifiable document for a reason – the founding fathers had the foresight 240 years ago to see that times will change and the Constitution will need to be updated accordingly.  As a result, I think the 2^nd Amendment could easily be altered to reflect a more modern definition of right to bear arms.  First off, when the Bill of Rights was written, the country was completely different – it was a largely agrarian society that had major issues with attacks from Native Americans, had hostile countries to the north and south of it, and lacked the funding to maintain a large standing army.  As a result, the solution was to allow the citizens of the country to maintain arms to both protect themselves while also providing a readily available source of manpower to form a militia in the event the country /state needed it.  Today, I would argue that the need for militias is completely removed considering the huge amount of money we spend on national defense.  Because of this fact, I do not think the common citizen needs access to military style firearms with high capacity magazines.  This doesn’t mean that you can’t own an assault rifle as you can use them for hunting, however you shouldn’t be able to have magazines with a greater capacity than several rounds as this only servers 1 purpose: putting as many rounds down range to kill people.  With that being said, I think the need for self-defense is still there so a common law abiding citizen should have access to self-defense weapons. 

This leads to my second point – this nonsense about not wanting background checks/mental health screenings for people to buy guns is crazy.  If you are mentally ill, have a criminal record, or have been part of an organization with ill-intentions as its primary purpose, you forfeit your right to own a firearm as you cannot be trusted.  To determine this, gun sellers must have access to this data and if there is anything the government is clearly good at (and too good at it in many ways), it is data storage.  The NRA (or at least some less than credible associates of the organization) has this ultimate conspiracy theory that by having to do background checks the government is recording where every weapon is in the country so that when they decide to take away all of our guns to prevent the next great revolution, they know exactly where to find them.  Being the engineer that I am, I actually ran the numbers on such an event if the government decided to do such a thing.  Assuming there are 150million firearms in this country, every single government employee (and I mean every single employee at the federal, state, and municipal levels – including the military, police, fire fighters, desk jockeys, etc…) would have to go out and fetch  almost 10 firearms apiece in order to accomplish the deed.  In today’s age of instant communication methods, there is zero chance that such an event would even get planned without the nation finding out none-the-less it getting started and the whole country flipping out before the evolution gets rolling.  It is flat out mathematically impossible.

So, in summary, I think that there should be restrictions on certain types of firearms, magazines, and ammunition, that there should be extensive background checks to determine eligibility, and that you must use the firearm responsibly in order to keep it.  I don’t think that outlawing all firearms is the answer as there are probably millions of unregistered weapons in the hands of people of ill-refute that would love to know that the person or house they are getting ready to knock off doesn’t have any real means of self-defense, so maintaining the self-defense aspect of the 2^nd Amendment is important.