New Gun Laws
One Old Veterans Opinion
School Shootings/ More Gun Laws: I only need one reason to oppose something but on this subject I’ve got a few. My biggest problem with adding more gun control laws on the books relates to enforceability. Remembering history has prevented me from making a lot of mistakes. Prohibition is one example of a law that was not enforceable and was eventually thrown away. Some of the law abiding Americans obeyed the alcohol law but it didn’t stop everyone else. In fact, it opened the door for more smuggling and created a niche for bootleggers.
The point is that banning something is a big waste of time if you can’t make it stop. Sometimes like with prohibition, the unintended consequences of the ban turns out to be the bigger problem. Law makers often dream up one law after another that sounds good, makes us feel good or helps them get reelected but can’t be enforced.
In the case of guns, failure to enforce laws that only make it harder on law abiding citizens can cost our lives. We can’t give back a life taken away by some criminal, enemy combatant, terrorist or enemy foreign nation like Russia or North Korea. There’s no way to predict how many lives will be saved when law abiding citizens have guns. What type they choose to use is always a topic up for debate.
I was trained with an M16 in the Army. M16’s are not legal to be carried by civilians in the United States because of their fully automatic feature. The counterpart to the M16 is the AR15 which doesn’t come with a full auto capability. It can however be converted/ modified for full auto but it’s not manufactured that way. I haven’t wanted to carry an M16 since leaving the military. My personal preference now is a 45 ACP but I won’t impose my preference on folks preferring an AR15 unless they do stupid things. In contrast, cars can be modified to run at speeds exceeding 300 mph but they weren’t manufactured that way. Most of us probably wouldn’t vote for a politician or a political party that tried to ban cars.
Unless a politician comes up with a way to stop the rest of the world from producing dangerous weapons, passing a law here doesn’t do much. We already have laws against certain drugs too but we allow migrants, smugglers and drug cartels to bring them here. If we can’t stop human traffickers and drug cartels, how would we stop certain guns from getting in here? What would make us believe that criminals or terrorist won’t bring guns to kill us? Until our enemies (foreign and domestic) can no longer get guns like that, banning them from Americans doesn’t sound right to me.