OK, three questions: 1. Are there any groups of people who should not be allowed to own guns?

[hedgehog]

2. Presuming that mentally ill people should not own guns, how do you identify mentally ill people before they hurt themselves or others? I would point out that while massacres by paranoid men with guns garner a lot of press, suicide by gun is also a major problem. http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp0805923

3. Presuming that criminals should not have guns, how do you keep criminals from having guns? I am very concerned here with ongoing gang wars that turn many of our cities into free fire zones.

[aikoaiko]

1. All states have law for civil commitment or mental health evaluations.

The list for disqualified owners is already long. let me see if I can find it and post.

[lawodevolution]

2. If you are not safe with a firearm you are either in custody of a caregiver, such as for

Normal children or mentally retarded individuals and as such the BOR does not apply to them and it is the job of the caregiver to keep their firearms out of their reach. If a person who is not under care of a caregiver and who is too dangerous to possess a firearm, such as a violent offender, he should be in prison and not on the street because he can get a gun no matter what laws are passed. If a person is to mentally ill to possess a gun they should be in a mental health facility where the administrator of such facility has the ability to decide that no weapons will be allowed inside.

[Statistical]

3. #1. Of course and there is a large list of existing prohibited persons.

#2. There is a mechanism but it is rather difficult. I don't have the answer but more dangerously mentally ill (danger to themselves or others) need to be put on NICS block list. It is a complex problem to solve and won't be solved by rhetoric.

#3. This is even more difficult. Most criminals don't buy legal guns. They would be flagged by NICS system. There is an estimated 200 million illegal/street guns in the US. Hypothetically even if the Police could remove 10 million guns of the streets per year (illegal guns not stupid buyback programs) and no more guns enter illegal gun supply we are talking a 20 year supply.

Likely #3 is impossible. We can and do make it difficult but there is such a huge supply or illegal guns. Drugs are illegal and there are billions of dollars worth of drugs in this country. Guns are no different. Prohibition doesn't work.


Richmond however significantly reduced violent crime rate by a program called "prject exile". If you are a felon and caught in possession of a firearm you do 5 years. Now this is an existing federal law that is rarely enforced. What Richmond did is make plea deals impossible, and passed control to federal prosecutors. Also felons would do their 5 years in a federal prison far away from home. They then combined that with PSA, billboards, and other awareness campaigns. If you are a felon and caught with a gun you are doing 5 years in "exile".

Real solutions are hard, complex, and take time and money. Stupid "ban assault weapons" are worthless but easy to accomplish. For the last 20 years there has been no sensible gun control proposed by gun control advocates.

[chibajoe]

4. You cannot be safe and free. At some point, you will have to choose

between one or the other. There is absolutely no way to prevent every single person who should not have access to a gun from getting a gun; it's an impossible fantasy postulated by people who can't phantom that reasonable people will be reasonable and crazy people will be crazy, regardless of how many or how few restrictions you impose upon them. The best you can hope for is that the reasonable people are given the means to defend themselves when the crazy people start doing crazy things.

[OneTenthofOnePercent]

5. 1) Mentally ill persons, children, and former violet felons/criminals

2)There is no way to predict behavior or mental competency by persons who have yet to be diagnosed. People who HAVE been mentally adjucated need to be entered into a federal/state database. This is atually the current policy, however many systems are inefficient and do not function well (For example Cho, the VT shooter, should not have been eligable to own firearms but a failure of the system allowed his name to fall though the cracks). On a side note, thinking anyone can stop suicididal people is pretentious at best - I mean, if they really want they can just use gravity to kill themselves.

2) You cant physically stop anyone from doing anything. You can go down to the local hardware store and buy materials to make explosives, drugs are readily available for purchase or manufacture despite many laws against it, nothing can stop you from making illegal turns or speeding... Basically, you can't control people - no matter how authoritarian you become.

[zipplewrath]

6. Premptive action

What you are getting at is basically "pre-emptive" action on the part of the government. Basically trying to prevent people from doing/owning/advocating things because of what MIGHT happen as a result. That's generally considered a bad idea.

The reason it is hard to pre-emptively stop the mentally ill before they take these kinds of actions. Heck, it is hard to define mentally ill without some actions of some sort, it's not like they have blood tests or something. It would be difficult to come up with a definition of mentally ill that pre-empted these actions, but did not also define Glenn Beck and/or Bohner as "mentally ill".

[slackmaster]

7. 1. Yes, those groups are defined in the United States Code, Title 18, section 922

2. An adjudication (court judgment) of mental incompetence is required to put a person in the prohibited class. Identifying them is everyone's responsibility.

3. Keep violent criminals in prison.

[hedgehog]

8. This post isn't a hit and run, but meant to try to get people to think instead of knee jerk.

I'll stipulate that you have a right to bear arms, but how do we keep that other guy from shooting people?

Putting the other guy in prison or an institution after the fact is small comfort to the survivors.

[Bonhomme Richard]

9. Birthers, but then that would fall under no. 1. n/t

[bowens43]

10. Yes, anyone not in a 'well regulated militia' nt