Do me a favor and run your little plan by a mental health professional, a social worker, a paramedic, a 14-year-old babysitter... The moment you left those guns in the hands of my emotionally distraught neighbor for even a second after he asked for help, you lost this particular argument.

There are decent arguments for a UBC; you're not making them. You should be focusing on what few public safety benefits would actually arise. You should be drawing attention away from the myriad administrative clusterfuck issues where UBCs fail, and toward those few scenarios where UBCs would actually benefit public safety. You should be conceding that "Universal" is completely impractical. You should be pointing out that none of the proposed "U"BC plans have ever actually been truly "U", and that all of them have included broad exceptions in a (piss-poor) attempt to avoid many of the problems I've described.

[–] Maggoty@lemmy.world 4 points 4 months ago (5 children)

No. If they want to surrender their firearms they can do so to an FFL or a police station. I'm very familiar with mental health stuff and having access to the guns in any way shape or form is extremely dangerous. That includes at places you frequent. The option is not, you taking them or nothing. Load them all in your car with your buddy and drive down to the local range. Arrange for storage there and leave them in the storage.

If you want to have guns you have to have the responsibility too. Kid time with the deadly weapons is over.

[–] Rivalarrival@lemmy.today -5 points 4 months ago (4 children)

you want to have guns you have to have the responsibility too.

No, you don't get to make that argument. Not after you try to make me a criminal for trying to take such responsibility. You're continuing to make the same mistakes. Argue better.

[–] daltotron@lemmy.ml 1 points 4 months ago

Also, why can't you just take your friend, friend's guns, in your car, to the range, store them there? is there any real problem with that, or any real reason why you specifically need to have the guns rather than the range, which might be a better long term storage solution? I'm not opposed to your solution, I think it's workable, I think it has potential to, maybe not get passed federally since the gun lobby is insanely powerful, but maybe work on a state-by-state basis, right, and build up from there. But if you do have an actual counterargument for what the guy's saying, then you should give it instead of just kind of deflecting, because right now he does seem to have basically refuted all of the hypotheticals you were able to give about why requiring some kind of record every time a gun is transferred is a bad idea, and why universal background checks and the state as an active third party rather than a retroactive third party might be a good idea.

The only counterargument I can really see against it is maybe that it would result in state overreach or people being prevented from having access to guns if we start to see disproportionate enforcement of crimes and certain crimes being reclassified as felonies or something, but that's also a problem with the current system that wouldn't really get solved by your proposal at all, so yeah, I dunno.

load more comments (3 replies)