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If, as I said, you have a responsible owner, you are not going to social engineer, or hack, a a gunsafe "password" out of them.Originally Posted by xodianbarr
Put it this way, you are not going to hack or engineer my credit card PIN out of me. I tell nobody, but NOBODY, that number, including any and all bank staff, even in a branch. Not even my wife knows my PIN number,s nor do I know hers. And that's just my credit card, let alone my safe, and my safe isn't a gun safe.
My original point was that if a child, or any non-authorised user for that matter, gets hold of a gun in a home, it's because the owner didn't responsibly secure them. And you said they're easy to get round. Only if you have an irresponsible owner.
Let me ask you a question .... do you drive?
Do you thing all cars ought to be banned, because some people drink drive? Or do you think there ought to be rules, and penalties for those that break them?
What about alcohol itself? Maybe we should ban alcohol because some people are irresponsible, drink to excess, and cause problems in town centres at night. Never mind that many, do doubt the vast majority, drink occasionally, often at home, socially or with a meal, let's ban alcohol because some people abuse it, right when we're banning guns because some people abuse them.
It is to all intents and purposes impossible to ban all guns in the USA. The way the laws and checks and balances are set up, short of a dramatic change in the attitude of the population, it simply is not going to happen. There are, for the remotely foreseeable future, going to be guns. And that's just the legal ones. Even if you do ban them, there are going to be illegal ones, and the chances of getting all guns off the streets, and even out of homes, is as close to zero as makes no difference. #
What you can do, and in many states is done, is restrict the types available. We've already mentioned that. You can impose carry restrictions. Many states do. You can limit immediate access, and again, many states do. You can restrict high capacity magazines and full auto, and again, such restrictions exist.
What you cannot do, and almost certainly never will be able to do, is to prevent every single nutcase, mentally ill person, criminal and/or psychopath from getting hold, one way or another, of any type of gun.
A lot has been said about assault-style rifles after the Lanza shooting, but honestly, I have to wonder just how much difference it made in that case, to the outcome. My bet would be, little, or none.
Had the not been carrying that Bushmaster, he still had a 9mm Sig and a 10mm Glock. Assume legal, 15-round magazines for each, and as he had, multiple magazines. One cop on the scene said "several hundred rounds".
So, no rifle, but two fairly powerful pistols, each with 15 round mags (for simplicity' sake), and each where you can change mag in a few seconds. Unless there is someone on the premises that is armed, or unless police can get there very, very quickly, the outcome, given his clear intent, would almost certainly have been exactly the same. The rifle, in that situation, is more about ego, about show, maybe about machismo, than about effectiveness. Now, if we were talking about something like the Beltway sniper, then rifles are far more of a threat. But that isn't the current context.
So, you are not going to take every handgun, or even just the legally held ones, out of every home in the US because the legal difficulties of doing it are extremely hard to surmount, and given the level of opposition, impossible to surmount. "It's our constitutional right" isn't just a redneck mantra, it's a simple, cold, hard FACT, and not only that right, but a fairly broad interpretation of it has been upheld, repeatedly and recently, by the Supreme Court.
So if you can't get the Constitution amended, and as said, that is next to impossible to do. It's a hard thing to do even if almost everyone does agree on something. And was deliberately set up to be extremely hard to do. That's the whole point of a constitution .... it takes basic rights out of the whim of the current administration. And if it was easy to change, what gets change next? The right to a freedom of speech (up to a point, anyway). Or the right to a lawyer? Or a fair trial?
From a pragmatic point, you are not going to get guns banned. In anything other than the fairly long term, and probably not even then, it simply ain't going to happen. It would also be next to impossible to enforce if it did happen. So people with evil intent are going to be able to get guns. You might be able to make it a bit harder, but you aren't going to stop it. And it's pretty clear there is going to be a regular stream of people wanting, under whatever sick of perverted logic, to "shock" by going and doing something more extreme than the last case. Sooner or later, it'll happen again, with or without a ban on assault-style rifles. It'll continue to happen for just as long as you've got a handful of sick and desperate individuals that have made the decision to, basically, suicide, and make a stand, a statement of an extremely unpleasant kind, first.
And if they couldn't get hold of guns, they'd build a bomb, or hijack a school bus, or poison an air-con system, or drive a bus into a queue or schoolkids, or whatever other sick and twisted exhibitionist scheme they manage to come up with. That, I'm afraid, is mankind for you, and will continue to be until we come up with a way to detect and either cure or indefinitely detain those with murderous and/or suicidal inclinations. And on that, I'd advise not holding your breath.
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