Nancy, “compromise” means each side gives in a little. It does not mean you steal fewer of my rights than you had hoped to.
Here’s a real compromise:
We set up a sensible qualification and training process with a full background check. That earns qualified folks an ID card. Those folks may then buy any gun of any type in any quantity they want, with no record kept of who bought what guns. (We might require a training endorsement for machine guns). Just like my ID lets me buy liquor without the government keeping a record of it.
That way, your paranoid delusions about people running amok and killing innocents would be addressed, as would my paranoid delusions that you’re simply out to create a database to enable confiscation, and subsequent genocide.
Now, lots of my gun nut friends are going to scream bloody murder at my notion that a fundamental right should be qualified by this kind of process (we don’t require you to have a college degree to write op-ed columns, after all). But if you can persuade your anti-gun friends to give up on the means for confiscation, I think I can get my friends to agree.
Of course, when you and your anti-gun friends refuse even to consider this compromise for sensible public safety rules that meet all your goals, it will leave us wondering what you really have in mind for us. Why do you want to disarm law-abiding Americans? What do you have in mind for us?
We have fought for years, even decades, to gain back a tiny portion of our right to self-defense. Any attempt to scrape away that thin veneer of freedom we have attained will be rejected unambiguously. The mere mention of wanting to take away our rights again is evil in great degree.
Here is a compromise. We, the citizens, will allow you to manage nuclear weaponry here and abroad IF and only if you require evidence of competency to vote in federal elections. We the citizens will determine the standards for attaining competency and those standards include knowledge of the system of government and being a taxpayer.
Your plan makes sense. And if the anti-gunners were truthfully interested in safety, you have covered their worries, and they should have no objections.
But they aren’t - they want all guns gone. So If they were to go for this conpromise, I predict backdoor problems. How much for the ID card and process? And then more $ to renew it. Then a felony for gun possession without the ID card (that you can no longer afford).
Remember what Franklin said, “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
I wouldn’t give up my most essential rights to the left wing extremists in exchange for a promise to be left alone. Regardless, the left are a pack of liars who cannot be trusted.
Yep.
But if you can persuade your anti-gun friends to give up on the means for confiscation, I think I can get my friends to agree.
Not this one, FRiend.
Ahhhh, no. There is NO Constitutional provision for any such thing and if you want such an abomination, YOU are as bad as Mad Nan, and are become the enemy, by your own actions.
Uh, nope.
Things resembling that are in effect in some states now and if that's what you like you can go there. Word on the street though is they are among the highest crime places in America.
Seriously that's a capitulation with which I'll not truck. Way too many opportunities to abuse and infringe, the list of doors to kick down in the night, for example.
Just because it's paranoia doesn't mean it can't happen. And if it did then it wouldn't be paranoia. And it has so it isn't.
I have chosen to be not listed on such a ready made database by where I live and how I do business. In a shall issue state, I have not and will not get a "permit".
To me it's already too much that somewhere there's one 20 year old ATF form with my name on it, the dealer having gone out of business and it's location uncertain, a consequence of the Clinton pushback on the kitchen table guys.
So again, nope.