IMO, and that of many others, we need to bring the 2nd Amendment up to the modern era...to that end, here is what Justice Scalia had to say about it...
"Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited," Scalia wrote as he laid out certain exceptions. History demonstrates, Scalia said, "the right was not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose."...
I'm no Constitutional scholar, but that comment goes right to "Assault Rifles" which literally by design are much more deadly than other weapons due to their high capacity magazines, high velocity ammunition design, light weight, barrel length and accuracy. I've also provided several links and a video that all attest to the fact that our military trains its soldiers to use the M-16 primarily in semiautomatic mode, making it exactly like the AR...and not only that, there is testimony from combat veterans who NEVER used the fully automatic feature...they relied on their squad's M-249, belt-fed light machine gun...which, btw, is not able to be mass marketed to the public...am I right on that?
As far as federal regulations are concerned, there is a timeline on that you can Google...most recently there's the NFA (1934)...FFA (1938)...GCA (1968)...FOPA (1986)...Brady Act (1993)...so there's a fair amount of precedent supporting federal regulations...leaving such a topic to the states only would invite chaos with deadly consequences.
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re: Mental Health, etc....
The banning of Assault Rifles gets headlines, but literally every gun control bill being put forward includes a great deal of emphasis on background checks, "Red Flags", minimum age and waiting time purchase requirements, etc...as you say "We should look into it", but unfortunately, even these facets of the problem, while very important and largely supported by gun owners, are objected to by the GOP in Congress...extremely frustrating..especially to the victims of mass shootings and their families.
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None of the people who perpetrated the recent mass shootings in schools, supermarkets or music concerts were "Gang Bangers" or prior "Criminals/Bad Guys"...they were anonymous psychos...while a couple of them could have been denied firearms through effective "Red Flag" legislation, others were totally off the 'grid' and would never be found out until AFTER the shooting... and so we come back to the need for responsible gun owners to 'sacrifice' accessibility to a class of firearm for the safety of everyone else in the country...
What keeps coming back to me is the fact that having Assault Rifles provide only pleasure for their owners...that's it...they don't provide any other benefit to society (9 mm handguns in the home are better for personal defense)...yet every single school in America is now living in fear, if not terror, due to their accessibility to those psychos who would slip detection...this is not a beneficial, nor rational, tradeoff.
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Every other nation on earth has human beings with the same mix of personalities...and the ones that have banned Assault Rifles...High Capacity Magazines, etc. have unequivocally demonstrated the value of that action...there is no reason why that couldn't work here in the USA...we've done it before (Google some of the federal legislation I outlined) and there was no "Black Market" that increased their usage...so there's no evidence to support the "Prohibition" reference.
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btw, thanks for taking the time to express your opinion...much appreciated...we really do need to come together on this issue...while I honestly don't see the "NEED" for the volume of guns we have, I'm not so naive as to think we could or should try to remove them all..."Prudential Judgement" tells me that there are many, many responsible gun owners who pose no threat at all, so they should be able to go deer/duck hunting, or visit a gun range (like I used to oversee) for target practice...I, and many others, just want some small degree of 'sacrifice' by the gun community in order to effect a dramatic reduction in the horrors being reeked on too many families...sounds like you're open to that.