Nothing is going to change. Americans love their guns more than they love people and after Sandy Hook we decided that killing over 20 children was acceptable and not outrageous enough to make reasonable restrictions on guns. This is America, a country that has been around for 200 years, a superpower, a 1st world nation, and one of the wealthiest countries on the planet and we refuse to protect our own people. We respect guns more than we respect the lives of people.
What specific gun control measures would you propose and how would they directly and effectively make society safer?
Absolutely get rid of all AR-15′s and the like.
Intense background and criminal background checks and anything violent automatically disqualifies you.
Make getting a gun/gun permit more like getting a driver’s license:
permit to learn
includes an exam with 18 or more questions on the policies, laws, and etc of guns and gun ownership
if you get more than 8 questions incorrect you must retake it.
30 hours of practical experience at a gun range with a licensed teacher
Must take a 5 hour class on the dangers of guns and how to use them safely which will then yield you a certificate that grants you to take the practical exam and lasts for one year. If you don’t gain the license within the allotted year you must retake the class.
A practical exam with a licensed instructor who will grade you on various skills. If you pass you may be granted a permit on the weapon of your choice, the exams may differ on the type of firearm you want.
Follow the Japanese model where you must have two gun safes in different areas of the house, one to store the gun and one to store the bullets and you must provide the police with information on where those safes are.
No concealed carry and only handguns may be allowed to be out in public.
If transporting a weapon, it must be in the trunk of the vehicle, in a bag or some other case, safety on and unloaded and may not leave the vehicle until you are at the destination.
If you’re a hunter or some other gun hobbyist that requires a functional weapon other than a handgun then the gun must stay on the premises, whether that is a gun range or the Fish and Wildlife facility.
If you live in a rural area where police (and people, for that matter) are few and far between, something akin to a deer hunting rifle should provide plenty of protection from predators and poachers, you still have to follow the aforementioned steps.
This doesn’t cover everything but I think it’s a good place to start.
Can you show me evidence that this would directly and effectively create a safer society?
I have never laughed so hard at a gun law post. Like seriously, the evidence is in fucking reality. The proposed restrictions are just fucking logic.
For the most part I agree with these. However I would respectfully ask, how would you take into accounts areas where having a gun is valid for self-protection, such as very rural areas in Alaska? And how does keeping the gun only the premise allow for hunting (for example, I don’t hunt in my apartment, but several thousand miles away from my house)?
I can answer that one. I lived in Australia for eight years. If you lived in an area where you legitimately needed a gun to protect yourself or your property (for example, farmers in rural areas who had to deal with potentially dangerous animals), you could apply for a special permit. If an investigation confirmed that your need for a gun was legitimate, you would be given permission to buy a hunting rifle. But the permit had to be renewed, so if you sold the farm or otherwise no longer needed the gun, you would have to hand it back in. (The government would reimburse you for it.)
It was simple, effective, and meant that the only guns in civilian hands were on farms a fuckmillion miles away from the cities and were actually being used for constructive purposes, not just collecting dust in a closet, waiting for some curious five year old to find them and blow their own heads off.
As for hunting weapons: you don’t bring them into the city. You keep them in a storage locker close to the hunting reserve.
People here own guns. They just have to have a valid reason to do so, be trained to use them, and must store and transport them safely.
The other day a rifle was discharged in my street. It was used by a volunteer wildlife rescue worker to euthanise a badly injured kangaroo. He kept it in a locked case in his truck until he determined there was no way to save the animal. He retrieved it, fired it once, returned it to its case and then phoned the local police department to let them know that he had discharged a firearm and why he’d done so, because it’s a semi-rural area and most people are like me. It was the first time, in my 20+ years of living in Australia, that I’ve ever seen a gun fired for anything other than practice.
The gun was there to do a very specific job. And when that job was done, it was put away. Zero fuss
Another prime example of a place with strict gun controls that has only had eight mass shootings in the last 20 years:
Can confirm: I had my firearms license. I had to do a 2-day class where we covered safety and laws, and then we had to do a written test. I also had to fill out paperwork and have it signed by guarantors (similar to getting a passport).
And that’s not even to OWN a gun, that’s just to have a license. If I recall correctly, you still can’t carry a handgun around on you all higgedly-piggedly just because you have a license. You have to have a legal job that requires a reason for carrying it, otherwise it’s illegal.
Gun control works. Dozens of countries have it and most of them have had less than 10 mass shootings in the past 20 years. In the US, we’ve had over 20 mass shootings in the last 10 months.
The more times I see this post, the better it gets. These are real statistics, yet we still have people denying that this works. OPEN YOUR FUCKING EYES AMERICA
