The reality is that responsible users use guns responsibly, but fear ignites gun purchasing for purchasing sake and doesn't insure responsible ownership as an absolute necessity of ownership.
The reality is that gun lovers mostly blame the stupid gun owners and the criminals who use them (for obvious reasons) so as to misdirect the blame that was never pointed at them in the first place.
The reality is that 85% of gun owners actually agree with doing something reasonably different about gun ownership and background checks, but the rhetoric doesn't allow.
The rhetoric says that more guns out there is the best way to deal with the potential danger of the guns we already have out there.
The rhetoric says that only law abiding citizens will follow new restrictive laws and not the criminals. I shake my head at the very notion of that idea since Webster's dictionary calls a criminal "one who disobeys the laws", which I would assume to include laws regarding gun ownership. By that reasoning, no law applies to the criminal element of society.
Can we at least get most of the criminal guns off of the street with some level of success that reduces street deaths by gunfire? The Australian plan of offering a "hefty" buy back price to street criminals for those weapons would take some guns off of the street, but the means by which they got there in the first place has to be addressed as well.
Is The Gun Industry Supposed To
Be Self Sustaining Like Farming?
Weapons in Mexico are almost exclusively created and purchased in the USA, and almost never under legal means. So unlike weed- which can be grown almost anywhere in the course of 100 days- weapons don't just grow out of the earth. They are engineered, serial labeled, packaged and shipped under strict tracking for an end destination that isn't currently tracked very firmly at all.
Way too many liberal gun laws (Texas) allow firearms to be purchased under the darkness of night and lost into the growing world of firearms in America and South America. We know who created them and when, but can't always pinpoint who has them now. And our laws currently say, that's okay.
If this one broken reality could be the only change that we make, we would have taken a major step forward. Unfortunately, the rhetoric works to maintain laws that say any person who owns a gun should have the right to sale that gun without hoop or hurdle, to whomever and whenever they please....because this is America. Most laws expect the purchaser to register that weapon under their name (like you do with a sale of a car), but nothing insures the step, allowing guns to get lost in the shuffle.
Suddenly, what seems like a reasonable idea gets lost in the swirl of fear and anger laced comebacks that are rooted in things that force you to peel back the onion skin even further to make sense of it all.
If you mention restricting mentally ill from the danger of themselves, the company line against that is a recognition that very few confirmed (diagnosed) mentally ill folks have committed these crimes and the confirmed crazy but dealing with it folks don't want to be made a target of our displaced frustration with senseless killings at the hands of just a few of their demented young brethren.
If you then switch the target of the argument onto assault weapons and weapons typically catered for environments of war, the crux of the true debate might finally reach the surface.
Most gun lovers have been convinced by the rhetoric that they need to uphold a Constitutional concern of the government moving to overtake the individual by taking away their guns first. They are not focused on the reality that an entire block of neighbors who all have multiple AR-15's, wouldn't be able to hold back the military force that exists in today's America versus the single shot musket world that wrote the damn Constitution.
Words (rhetoric) are clearly powerful. Much more powerful than guns, yet they crumble in the face of reality. Gun lobbyists are keeping their harvest and production of guns ripe and fervent from season to season with distorted perceptions created by powerful rhetoric of fear.
Most gun owners who come to the end of the line with the reality of the 85% concession on background checks, will reticently draw the line back, but only a little bit with their well trained 'agree to disagree' rhetoric that goes: "if you don't want guns in your home, that's fine....just keep your hands off of mine".
Does that also include your bullets? In California, a measure is moving forward to require background checks on the actual deadly parts of guns (bullets) instead of fighting the war with gun owners over the encasement of the bullets. California is not only chasing to deal with the access to ammunition, they are doing it using the same ballot initiative approach that brought medical marijuana to California. With technology available to uniquely assign bullets to the owner of a gun (microstamping), limiting access to death pellets is a reasonable next step towards addressing the reality of gun growth, the challenge of tracking gun deaths in America in the ongoing effort to solve crime and reduce gun deaths.
Direct Democracy?
Whilealso admitting to some drawbacks, California Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom called laws that permit state ballot initiatives, Direct Democracy. I personally call it the way in which America stops fearing its own government and finally recognizes our capacity to govern ourselves while modernizing our sacred Constitution for times like these.Our voice is way too loud in this digital era for Congress to hold the will of the people hostage to the power of rhetoric, generated by the gun lobby. Yes, over reach is always a risk during government intervention efforts. But not more risky than continuing to insist that doing nothing can possibly make something change.
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