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Originally posted by seretogis
Well, the Supreme Court disagrees with you.
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You would be astonished to realize how many times I have disagreed with the Supreme Court. It
may have something to do with the fact that it's highly conservatively tilted, but then, that's not always been the case.
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...A "well regulated militia" is NOT the National Guard. The National Guard is officially a branch of the military.
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We could argue that point back and forth all day long. To keep it short, I strongly disagree on the principle, if not the organizational status, of the National Guard. That said, then we should turn to the regulation clause, indicating that the militia - taken in your argument to mean any American citizen who owns a gun and is capable of defending his country - should be closely regulated. This dovetails nicely into your next point:
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How does gun registration help prevent crimes? It doesn't.
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Mostly because registration efforts have, to this point, been spotty and insufficient. I'm personally quite interested in the ballistic profiling of weapons. I also think there's a way out there somewhere to trace back any bullet fired to a specific gun, or at least to a small subset of guns which would at least aid in the solving of gun crimes. Registration is not a magic bullet, but it sure as hell can't hurt.
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Trigger locks are good. Forcing people to use them is bad.
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In some cases; any home lacking another means to keep children from getting to a gun kept in that home should require them.
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As for criminalizing "failure to keep a gun safely", I don't think there is a need for this. Negligence laws already would cover this if someone was directly at fault for an accidental shooting.
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Unfortunately, that's a strawman argument. Negligence laws have been specifically hamstrung to avoid dealing with cases of gun negligence. Stronger anti-gun-negligence laws are needed. Full stop.
As far as assault weapon, I personally define this as any weapon capable of carrying more than twelve rounds at any time, firing in full-automatic mode (already illegal), any weapon capable of firing a round heavier than .45 caliber, or any military-grade ammunition (e.g. jacketed rounds, teflon rounds, tracer, etc.). Mind, there are weapons that defy categorization, those need to be dealt with individually. But this usually works for me as a good basic definition.
I don't think guns should be eliminated (though sometimes I think they never, ever should have been permitted outside of the military). But I do think that they should be more tightly controlled, and that commission of gun crimes should carry the stiffest penalties possible under our legal system.