It’s rather provoking to hear the cries of gun owners every time the need for better gun control legislation, or any gun control laws, are brought up after a new mass shooting incident in the United States. The NRA booster cry is always the same — 2nd Amendment; you can’t take my guns away from me!!!
The issue is NOT to take away guns as sanctified in the 2nd Amendment. Responsible gun owners are in control of their guns. But those people who properly control their guns should be invested in teaching that responsibility, and in being on the front line of helping to solve the problem of controlling the gun trade. Those who do not have an interest in gun safety and control are a minority controlling the lack of national action.
Movies are violent, video games are violent, the national society is fractured and violent. Owning a car requires registration, and drivers must be licensed. At the least, register and license guns to help curb the growing menace of death by fire arms, just as similar laws help control death by car. The argument that cars and guns don’t kill people is a side-track used to sway the weak-minded. People, of course, use those objects to kill, so those objects need to be put in the hands of responsible people who obey laws. Registration and licensing help that effort tremendously. Black markets in guns, cars, people, whatever, will always exist in a free society, but they will be curbed by laws with teeth.
A FINGERPRINT REGISTRY
The United States has a huge fingerprint registry that helps track down criminals, DNA evidence has greatly enhanced the ability to identify criminals, and citizens are more than willing to report what they may have seen, or heard, in regard to criminal activity.
Gun registry and license requirements should be patterned after the regular fingerprinting methodology. Gun sellers should be required to keep the paper trail visible by reporting sales, registration, and licensing paperwork to their local law enforcement offices. Background checks should be stiffer, and completed, not by-passed to speed sales. Accountability must exist when these requirements are law and the law is not followed.
Anyone flaunting weapons on social media and indicating misuse of those weapons should be reported immediately to local law enforcement, and/or the FBI, so the ‘gun fingerprint’ paper trail can be accessed. Everything else is done by computer today, and ‘gun fingerprinting’ can be done, also.
Shoring up the breakdown in requirements and reporting where guns are concerned can only serve to help curb gun violence. Proper training for law enforcement to respond effectively to shooting incidents is also lacking and has been exposed time and again.
Car accident statistics wouldn’t be available without record-keeping. Paper trails always lead to helping secure resolutions.
GOOD THOUGHTS:
Long ago, Edmund Burke tried to sway men’s souls:
“Public life is a situation of power and energy; he trespasses against his duty who sleeps upon his watch, as well as he that goes over to the enemy.”
— Edmund Burke
Burke also was known to indicate that all it takes for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing.
It’s well past time to do something more positive to curb gun violence in the United States. Weak legislation that does not hold all people in the arena of gun sales and purchases accountable to responsibility isn’t enough.
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Credit: Photo from the personal and copyrighted collection of Barbara Anne Helberg
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