(Almost at the end of my time for the next day or so, but can't
quite drop out yet...)
me too. it's my birthday, and I'm going to go get drunk and shoot my
guns downtown tonight.
:-D
I'm not sure how it would work either. There is a balance to find.
My thought wasn't so much that the gun seller nor the "government"
would be notified, but that the counselor (or the organization
through its counseling department or whatever) would be notified. No
one else even needs to know that the record was created. (I don't
know how.)
That's just it. It would require a list of people in counseling, and
a name of their counselor, kept on record somewhere. basically, a
list of "crazy" people who have committed no crimes. I don't know how
that's possible. The only possible way would be to have every
counselor do a check on all his patients on a regular basis against a
database of recent gun purchasers. And the only way you could get
them to do that would be to make them somewhat liable for possible
future actions of the patient.
> this is a straw man, because most college kids wouldn't carry guns.
> Only a few would.
It's a possible straw man _if_ the meaning was that the majority
_would_ carry guns. But that wasn't the intended meaning. I wanted
to express the thought that most of them weren't rational
gun-carriers. If out of a hundred kids I knew, two of them regularly
carried guns, I'm not at all sure whether I'd want it to be one
Niedemeyer and one Blutarsky. It doesn't mean a majority carrying;
it means that most of them weren't what I'd like to think of as
carrying at all.
I would bet that more than two of them carried. Most people I know
who carry don't advertise, even to friends. They would just as soon
no one know until releasing that information becomes useful.
> Let me ask a question, when you were in college, if you were aware of
> an idiot with a carry permit being irresponsible with a gun, would you
> just avoid him or notify someone in authority of his irresponsible
> tendencies? What would most people do?
Ummm... going back 35+ years... well, I did know a few who were
questionable. On the whole, I'd go with notifying authorities. I
would expect most people to do the same under similar circumstances.
I'm not sure how similar the circumstances are with 'today' though.
Everything's a bit more frantic. There seem to be a couple extra
nut-cases in every group nowadays.
teach your children well. the massacre you prevent might be your own.
What worries me most is that there doesn't seem to be _any_ path
that doesn't lead _towards_ citizen disarmament. With a significant
increase in guns being carried, there'd necessarily be a rise in
easy availability of guns.
your worry is my sigh of relief. There will always be a ready supply
of guns for criminals. It is the nature of the beast we have in this
country.
If I'm a nut-case who can't legally get a gun but I find out that
THAT guy carries one at most times...? All I gotta do is poke a hole
in him when he's around the corner and I can turn the next corner
with a gun in my hand.
thus, the need to not advertise. see above.
It feels as if 'society' is going to find some way to remove guns
from society. Probably not in my lifetime, but ya' never know. And
maybe it has to happen at some point.
But I'll make sure that I'll be buying as soon as it happens.
ah, the truth comes out. gun ownership is ok for me but not for thee?
a little elitist, don't you think? ;-)
