> Seems like the best plan is to give weapons to those most responsible, rather than only those who would use them for bad.

That's the old Charlton Heston argument. There are "good" people and "bad" people. How likely is it that a teacher is going to flip and kill Andy, 16, next time he shoots his mouth off?

> It's not like all guns are just going to disappear into thin air.

The UK essentially legislated away private gun ownership years ago. But of course, it's a society choice. I'd rather live in a society where my kid can go to school safely, with no guns on the premises.

> "That's the old Charlton Heston argument. There are "good" people and "bad" people."

It's true though. Even better, we can in practice select "good people" (defined as "won't murder somebody with a gun") from the general public with an exceedingly low false positive rate (although with a high false negative rate).

The combination of having to fill out stacks of paperwork for the ATF, go through their background checks, pay a $200 per-gun tax, and pay several thousands of dollars for the gun itself makes for a very effective "good people" filter.

It makes for an unconvincing argument when you consider that the guns involved in the Lanza shooting were legally held, for instance. Same thing for Breivik. The fact is, it's disproportionally easy to kill a large number of people with semi-automatic weapons. One false positive means a lot of dead people. Not to mention the risk of theft by less savoury characters, assuming the filter did work in the first place.

That isolated false positives created a lot of dead people, but even when you look at the statistics of how many dead people were killed by rich or poor people, the statistics are still overwhelmingly against poor people. Breivik and Lanza are exceptions that proof the rule.

Furthermore, people purchasing semi-automatic weapons are not subjected to the scrutiny that I described. What I described is the process that you go through if you want to buy an automatic weapon. The high price of semi-automatic rifles such as AR-15's discourage use by people who would abuse them, but the even higher price of automatic weapons is even more effective. Only two people have been murdered with legally owned automatic weapons since the 1930s.

I'm a bit lost wrt what argument you're trying to make here. What does rich vs poor has to do with anything?