[UGAalum94]

Not to go all bumper sticker slogan on you all*, but I think that when we worry a lot about more restrictions, we limit our analysis to cases, like the recent college shootings, where we have a shooter who acquired the gun through legitimate means and we think to ourselves, no one should have ever sold that guy a gun.

But we kind of ignore all the instances where people have acquired their guns illegally and use them to victimize others. More restrictions on the the law abiding probably won't really appreciably reduce the amount of gun violence; they just make the rest of us easier to victimize.

I'd be all about more gun safety classes, but even more about good parenting and supervision of children generally. A well-supervised child in a "child-proofed" house doesn't shoot anyone, you know? Good parents generally don't don't shoot their kids or associate with people who are likely to shoot their kids or allow them to shoot themselves. (We had a situation in Georgia recently in which a two year old shot himself with his babysitter's gun which was left where he could reach it while his babysitter napped. Sure without the gun, it couldn't have happened; but there are several other factors that could have been altered in the situation to get the same result without restricting guns.)

I'm not sure that it's the guns that are the main issue in most of these family-based tragedies although they sure aren't helping any.

As far as whether we'd be better or worse off in general if more people could carry guns legally wherever they wanted to, I have no idea, but I think we can be confident there would have been fewer college students dead as part of the most recent campus shootings had other students been well trained in the use of handguns and armed. The shooter would have been taken out quicker.

ETA: I just want to make clear that I'm obviously not in favor of arming the mentally ill in case anyone was tempted to spin my post that way. I do think that it's going to be problematic to figure out exactly how the restrictions will work. Is it a lifelong ban if you've ever sought mental health treatment? ( which is only a problem for me because it might make people less likely to seek treatment rather than just preventing them from buying guns) And with the Va.Tech guy, it seems to me that what needed to happen in that case goes so far beyond just not letting him acquire weapons or ammo. He needed to be institutionalized and seems like it was clear long before the crime.

ETA* It occurs to me that bumper stickers reading "If we make guns illegal, then only criminals will have guns" bummer stickers may not be as common as they used to me, so that's what I'm referring to. The slogan reflects all the usual problems with bumper sticker thinking, I know.