| theprof00 said: But if you sold someone a gun, that's different, isn't it? |
Is it? I mean, there are lots of legitimate reasons for a person to own a gun. What should a gun shop's liability be when one of their customers - particularly one who has passed a background check and everything - goes and does something awful with the gun they bought?
But as for gun control on the whole, it just seems to be very odd that the onus always falls on the pro-gun side. I'm not terribly interested in guns myself and haven't owned one in a long time, but gun control just doesn't seem to work very well. Look at places like Chicago and D.C. that have had super stringent laws (which were later ruled unconstitutional) and still have massive amounts of gun crime. It seems horribly immoral to disarm law-abiding people in dangerous neighborhoods while being completely impotent when it comes to controlling the bad element there. I'd say it's downright perverse to expect someone like Wayne LaPierre to answer for the Newton shootings when the anti-gun crowd skates on having to answer for the abysmal failures of gun control in other places.
It's true that local gun control isn't really workable because of areas that do allow guns. Guns in Chicago have always come from places where guns are legal, but isn't that going to happen with a federal ban as well? The feds don't seem to have any luck stopping the drugs they've banned from coming over, nor do they seem very serious about controlling the border in general, so the dynamic would seem to be exactly the same: the law only affects the kind of person who is already inclined to abide by it and thus isn't much of a threat, while people who don't give a fig about the law continue doing whatever they want.
