Gun bill supported by Va. Tech families hits snag in Senate

wdbj7.com ^ | October 16, 2007 | NA

[hunter112]

You make some great points, but the courts are already in the business of determining sanity, in the case of criminal liability for actions. Yes, some might well want to use a lower standard of proof for gun ownership than they would for criminal culpability, but we will always be fighting the gun grabbers as long as we live, anyway.

Is it naive to think that a law involving reporting of the VT gunman's mental issues might have caused some sort of intervention by authorities before he did what he did, or at least slowed him down somewhat? Or, are we always going to have the criminally insane with us just as much as we have the gun grabbers? Right now, there are people who strongly feel that such laws might be of benefit, and those who oppose those laws need to make an intellectual argument as to why they won't work.

[Gondring]

You're on the right track by trying to bring accountability into it both for overdiagnosing and underdiagnosing, but the problem is that there is no exact science in this to predict outcomes. Americans no longer have an understanding of risk management; they now insist on 100% safety, without realizing that many actions that provide an illusion of safety do not actually protect.

So I think that the argument has to be broader and deeper--getting us back to where Americans understand that some personal risk and responsibility will always be involved, even if we take the most draconian, police-state measures, and that the best risk-management approach is to let psych professionals (and others...e.g., LEOs) do their job as best they can, unencumbered by fear and inclination to skew their judgment artificially.

In practice, the unintended consequences appear to be minimal to the typical non-gun-owner...so in the short-term, we have to point out the direct threats to them that these actions create. For example, when Virginia removed officer discretion and mandated arrests in domestic disturbances, which led to automatic removal of gun rights, the domestic disturbances became more violent ("I'm gonna lose my rights anyway, even if I didn't do anything, so now I'm REALLY mad and not going down easy!")

I'm afraid American education is so poor that this direct argument is the only way to get through to your typical soccer mom these days--appeal to second-order thought and deeper consequences won't work, I'm afraid, in the short-term.

Just my $0.02.

[neverdem]

Senator Christopher Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat, said he would put a personal hold on the compromise cooked up by Senator Rockefeller and the White House.

Here's an example of what I tried describe the other day.