Guns And The Laws That Govern Them

I posted this a way back - but the facebook comments are just awesome.
Your country has a serious oversupply of whackadoodles. My sympathies.

And that raises a question. If you can’t stop ideas from crossing borders—if you can’t surveil every node of every network, peer into every soul, and know in advance who’s becoming radicalized—then you have to look for some other, more material transaction to monitor or control . The most obvious such transaction is the acquisition of weaponry. In the ideal world of the National Rifle Association—a world in which guns are freely available and our sole method of regulating their use is through mental health treatment, or sometimes through criminal background checks—anyone with a clean record can buy all the guns and ammo he wants, without raising any alarms. Including Syed Farook.

I’m a skeptic of gun laws. The weapons used in San Bernardino were apparently purchased legally, under California’s relatively strict laws, and then modified illegally. Rounding up most of the guns in this country would be logistically impossible, and enacting mandatory registration would be an enormous political challenge.

But if you’re not willing to pursue some kind of gun registration or gun control, then you’re left with the psychology of the shooter. And what San Bernardino just demonstrated, in the grisliest way, is that we’re even less capable of tracking psychology than we are of tracking guns. So if you want to blame radical Islam, go right ahead. And tell us how you’d monitor the flow of radical Islam from Syria to California. And if you can’t answer that question, then ask yourself whether you love liberty so much that you’re willing to defend the right of everyone, including aspiring jihadists, to stockpile and bear unregistered arms.

I posted this a way back - but the facebook comments are just awesome.

Your country has a serious oversupply of whackadoodles. My sympathies.