I don’t know if OP is stating that only s/he is qualified. But that if someone wants to explain knowledge of guns enough to control them, they should spend some time understanding their subject.

And saying someone is stupid isn’t mocking. (Although it can be)

It’s like old men legislating abortion laws who know nothing about female specific health topics.

Pointing out ignorance is not mocking intelligence.

The tone of the comment seems intended to dismiss through ridicule, but that's beside the point. Its thesis that that one should have knowledge of guns and gun culture to have a credible opinion on gun legislation, so I'm merely asking that be followed up on, with an opinion on gun legislation from those with credible opinions.

I see a lot of dismissal of gun control advocates in threads like these, but arguments regarding gun control from those who claim authority on the matter tend to devolve towards strident defiance - "if you try to take my gun I will shoot you with it." That doesn't make for constructive discussion.

Most firearm violence is committed using handguns and most illegal guns are obtained through straw purchases. The best thing we could do would be to implement universal background checks (i.e. require background checks for private sales) but in a privacy-conscious and convenient way that will maintain support from the pro-gun side. Some kind of app or mobile website that allows the background check to be conducted for free on a smartphone, perhaps using token-based authentication to avoid the need to share personal information.

People who sell guns want a way to perform background checks on the people they sell to, but there's no way to do it because only licensed dealers can access NICS. As long as the private background check system has the same privacy invariants as the existing paper system for dealers (primarily that it is not possible to look up which guns someone owns, only to take a serial number and see who owns it) there won't be significant opposition.

Still waiting for the answer here.

What the NRA is doing is a disservice to gun owners. They are making a gun ban more likely by not offering any reasonable alternatives.

My opinion is we need state run (but federally funded) gun licensing to ensure safe owners and gun registry to ensure the guns stay with those owners.

Other countries do it. It works just fine. We are not having that conversation in America today in part because of the extremist views of the NRA.

The registry is a non-starter. A significant fraction of gun owners will see registration as a precursor to confiscation. A smaller fraction fear that the registry will either be public from the start or significantly breached within a short time frame, such that gun owners will be selectively targeted for harassment or burglaries.

Given what New York has done recently, I presume that a lot of gun owners will also simply refuse to comply with any registration orders. And, as usual, the black market guns will remain nigh-untraceable, especially among those who are barred by law from owning them.

The best you could do is a database of last-known locations, maintained entirely without cooperation by owners, that will probably consist mainly of business locations of licensed firearm dealers and crime scenes.

> A smaller fraction fear that the registry will either be public from the start or significantly breached within a short time frame, such that gun owners will be selectively targeted for harassment or burglaries.

Gawker is well ahead of you here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-01-09/gawker-po...

It's not clear whether there is, in fact, any obvious or easy improvement on what the US has already. If there was it'd likely have happened already. I mean, I live in the UK which has outright banned handguns and doesn't consider self-defense justification for gun ownership, but that won't fly in the US - it's unconstitutional and goes against the principles the country was founded on, and it'd require an lot more trust in your police force and a much less rural population - and probably wouldn't be enough to satisfy gun control supporters anyway.

Surely the burden for coming up with a reasonable, sensible gun control proposal should be on the people who're insisting we could have one if it wasn't for the pesky NRA and their gun nut supporters?

I already put it out there. Gun licenses and gun registry.

Without that there is no room to enforce regulation. The NRA and the gun culture will never budge on these two items, so they make an outright ban inevitable.

People can call things reasonable or unreasonable, that's fine but try to argue that registering a gun or obtaining a license is such an undue burden for the individual gun owner vs the harm of vast unchecked gun profileration for the rest of society.

NRA supporters are gun nuts. I am a gun owner.

There is a difference.

Here is a recent ad from the NRA,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrnIVVWtAag

That doesn't come off as at least a little unhinged to you?

The NRA does a disservice to gun owners and the whole country with their amped-up, violent rhetoric.

> The NRA and the gun culture will never budge on these two items, so they make an outright ban inevitable. > ... > NRA supporters are gun nuts. I am a gun owner.

Well I don't want to give an inch more to gun control proponents because they have already made their intent clear, they believe that a completely gunless society is much more admirable than what we have today.

It's like this, imagine if a British politician Nigel Windsor calls for the 'assassination of the Queen' and overthrowing of Monarchy. Upon failing to achieve support on that, he proposes bill such as "Full budgetary accountability of Queen's security" or "Transparency of Queen's Expenditures" where Queen's security details be made published or "How about we reduce the number of Queen's guards by just one".

Who in their right mind would believe that Nigel Farage wants "sensible expenditure on Queen's security" since we know that at the end he wants to overthrow the British Monarchy?

This is the same case with gun control. We know that most gun grabbers don't own guns, have never owned guns and will never own guns, it's not in their culture. They also fantasize European countries regarding Healthcare, gun control, hate speech, discrimination laws and Australian style complete gun confiscation. Now they say "Come to a reasonable gun reform or a complete ban is inevitable", which to gun right proponents sounds like "Publish Queen's security detail or else an assassination of the Queen is imminent", I'd say if they could ban guns, then they would have.

> Well I don't want to give an inch more to gun control proponents because they have already made their intent clear, they believe that a completely gunless society is much more admirable than what we have today.

This is exactly my point. You point to extremism as justification for yet more extremism in the opposite way. This won't end well for anyone. I'm not sure how, but as a society we need to find a way just sit down and walk things back. I'm willing to work towards a compromise. It seems you would rather not budge, and so the extremism continues.

There are plenty of people like me who don't care about 100yr old rifle historians, or hunters, or sport shooting, or the rest. We just want our kids to not get shot, and think that the current level of gun violence is far too high. Where can we turn to? Gun lovers and the NRA specifically don't seem to be able to offer any response at all beyond "my cold dead hand" and "don't give an inch".

Bump stocks are likely on their way out. They seem to be only suited for throwing a lot of bullets around indiscriminately.

In some states, sure.

At a federal level, it's not that easy. If there was an easy way to ban them, the ATF would have already. It's really hard to define a bump stock in a way that wouldn't either ban a lot of other things, short of classifying them as machine guns. If you classify them as machine guns, at this point, you pretty much have to let people who already have them enroll them on the NFA registry (federally, there is no legal basis to confiscate property that was legally acquired and legal to acquire when acquired), which is not necessarily what you want either.