Mental Health
- High priority, threats being taken as a precursor to domestic terrorism, triggering automatic full on electronic surveillance (email, social media, and phone conversations). Any hint of threats results in guns in household being seized. Call this domestic terrorism with all that it implies. This would include credible verifiable threats against spouses and partners.
- Background checks (BGC)
- Wait periods, cooling off as well as time to do background checks
- Cooperative mental health flags being legalized and part of the BGC process
- Domestic violence being considered a red zone
- *Harsh penalties for owner’s of guns letting them get into the wrong hands
- Federal laws versus state laws, thereby increasing effectiveness of better state laws
- Responses designed to encourage citizens reporting things they are aware of that indicate that someone is contemplating and threatening an act of terrorism. A person is far likelier to report something they heard if the response is going to be decisive.
Restrictive firearm roles
- Magazine size restrictions, Californians can go to another state and get high capacity mags
- Tax an assault type weapon, money to be used for increased mental health checks
- Age restriction for unsupervised use
- Concealed/open carry standardization
There seems to be a tendency here for the left to put far more emphasis on vilifying the assault weapon as the driver of mass shootings than the part that makes the real difference, all of the mental health aspects with making intervention better accessible to law enforcement and those conducting background checks. Mass shootings executed by teens indicates a firearm accessibility that can best be addressed by holding those facilitating the access more accountable.
I point this out because a total ban on assault weapons would have very disappointing results without the focus on the mental health and facilitating legal intervention.
Civil rights be damned when loose civil rights means kids are being shot that could be prevented if the culture of 2nd amendment rights are changed to privilege that has a standard of being for responsible and well balanced people versus any unhinged whack job that wants a gun. Anybody who openly threatens violence with the use of a firearm just lost their rights, PERIOD.
I’ve been looking at statistics of states pertaining to the ones with tougher gun laws versus the more free states. Not surprisingly the deaths per capita are statistically significant, here we have the states where gun laws are way more permissible, and they have a much higher rate of gun violence.
We have hard right conservative views that reject any gun laws, and a hard left that would confiscate every gun in the country if they could, less hard wants a total assault rifle ban, and I won’t argue that that doesn’t have merit. I will argue until the cows come home that the assault rifle is not at the root of this, we are far too lax because of the conservative point of view rejecting sensible gun laws.
I’d like to see a moderate and compelling case made for the part of this that will make immediate differences. We are already seeing an encouraging number of interventions that can only be seen as the result of a better public awareness and proactive attempts to intervene.
* I put a star by something I think is big, holding parents and family or friends that made access possible liable. How many times have we heard from a parent or guardian that the monster that killed kids at school “They never thought their little boy would do something like this”, “that they knew the kid had issues, but never thought they would do something like that”. Uh huh, put a prosecution into the equation for little Cruz’s murders for facilitating murder and see how differently they look at how unstable their kid is. See if that kid has the combo to the gun safe then.
We are getting into something that society has no tolerance for, and it’s having our hands tied from responding in sensible ways to deprive unhinged and dangerous individuals with serious issues to have access to guns.k