cowboyjosh2010

I know I'm not Goddard, but I can possibly help you understand why gun rights advocates seem so reluctant to even compromise. Many of the loudest and most influential gun control supporters on the national scale have one goal and one goal only in mind: reduce the number of guns in the country. They may tweak what they say so it sounds like they only want to go so far, but typically that tweak is made simply so they don't get immediately (pardon the wording, but...) shot down before a vote can happen. Gun owners almost always are more aware of the history of gun control legislation than non-gun owners, so we have recognized this pattern of behavior: they'll push the legislation that only partially accomplishes their overall goal of reducing the number of guns just because it'll be better than nothing. So when a piece of gun control legislation "only" does this or that reasonable thing, pro-gun folks still want to fight it because there's a good chance that no matter how well intended the legislation is, it'll help somebody with less reasonable goals get a foothold. Call it a slippery slope, sure, but until gun control advocates as a whole lose the "less guns = better, no matter what" mentality, it's how we'll react.

Further, and I'll be more brief with this aspect of it, but typically those who promote gun control are poorly informed about just what it is that they are trying to ban. There's the infamous quote where, in response to being asked what a barrel shroud was, Carolyn McCarthy responded "I believe it is a shoulder thing that goes up." That's so laughably inaccurate that it should be on an SNL skit, but it's what a person of political power really thought it was. Now, her quote is an extreme case, but it is very common that politicians simply don't really understand the reality of what gun control laws are legislating. That's another reason pro-gun rights folks don't like to bend: oftentimes they believe they are more aware of what the laws might actually be getting at than the politicians do.

I can't speak to why the pro-gun control side seems to not want to compromise, though. And since I'm not on that side I'll leave it to somebody else to answer that part of the question.

This is the kind of shit that makes me hesitant to ever buy a car made in the past decade. If I can't fix it myself, it better be because I don't have the proper lift, or the tool to do it is prohibitively expensive to buy for one repair. If I can't fix it because the software went bad and I can't plug into it to fix it, then we're gonna have problems.

Yeah that piece of "advice" from him was so absurdly misguided I immediately forgot about it. Shots = plural = >1 shot. Double-barreled shotgun = 2 barrels = 2 shots, then reload. So, he thinks it's best to empty your gun, then reload it, then shoot to kill if you still have to. Idiocy.

Great question. I don't see how a private sale background check can be enforced unless a database is maintained that tracks who owns what guns, and even that database won't do anything unless there is a system that checks every so often to see that those people really do still have those firearms. In other words, we're looking at keeping track of transactions and possibly even registering firearms. IF there were a way to perform background checks privately that was both reliable and also didn't involve those side effects you'd have far more gun owners on board with private background checks.

I know many people have pointed this out to your replies, but I have to ask it, too: if his record went unreported and that's why he was able to buy those firearms, then why not focus on BETTER background checks and better funding for those checks as opposed to (or hell, even in addition to) expanding the circumstances which require background checks?