gulliver
gulliver's Journal"Getting" more out of people instead of "giving" them more.
JFK said, "...ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country."
I hear the plans to tax the wealthy and corporations, and I strongly agree with them. I hear "free health care for all." I hear "free education for all." I strongly agree with those too.
But it's not just out of empathy that I agree with our country "investing" in those things. I'm not merely a "bleeding heart liberal." I'm also partly a "bad person," like perhaps one or two others in the world. Therefore, one of the main reasons I want our government to ensure free health care, free education, high quality child care, guaranteed nutrition, etc., is not because it will make people happier. (That's great but...) one of the main reasons is that by our government efficiently supplying those things, I'm going to get something out of it for good old number one.
I'm going to "get," in other words, for my selfish, nasty self and my offspring a better, cleaner, friendlier, stronger, wealthier world than I have now. We'll all be bettering ourselves. I'll be a better person (there's quite a bit of room for improvement) and have better people to be among. (You other people have somewhat more room for improvement than I do.)
In the end, if we get the right amount of investment units to the human resources, I'll have better thing makers to make better things for precious me. I'll have better trained, better dispositioned, more enthusiastic people to take care of selfish old me in my rapidly approaching old age. That's pretty important to me.
I realize that makes me a churl, and that almost no one else in the world thinks that way, but, yeah, there it is. I'm only bringing this up in case someone wants to point out to voters that Dem ideas are actually good for the few selfish people in the world.
Repeal the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act instead of banning assault weapons.
The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act of 2005 greatly restricts the rights of Americans to seek damages from gun manufacturers and dealers in court. I would say repealing that law might do a lot more to solve the gun problem than attempting to ban assault weapons.
For one thing, there would be no need to define what an assault weapon is. We wouldn't have this whack-a-mole game with the gun industry thinking up technicalities to get around the assault weapons ban. We wouldn't have all these subtle issues like magazine capacity to try to encode. The NRA, for its part, would not have a myriad of state and federal "restrictions" to exaggerate and use to stampede people to the polls for Republicans.
Second, repealing the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act would expose other types of gun possession and ownership to proper levels of liability. Gun dealers and owners would no longer be able to sell just any gun, gun accessory, or ammunition to just anyone without managing financial risk.
What would happen if the law were repealed? Imo, guns would not completely go away, even "assault rifles," although ownership levels of weaponry of all kinds (assault weapons, perhaps much more than others) would drop dramatically. A huge "gun insurance industry" would likely spring up, and there would be a near-unanimous demand for a thorough system of dynamic, continuous background checking.
The gun industry, dealers, and owners would be at the front of the line clamoring for effective background checking to minimize insurance costs. It wouldn't be merely "point of sale," one-time background checking but would be more like a continuously updated "gun trustworthiness check" similar to our current financial credit checking systems.
If you want to sell even a single cartridge, your gun insurance policy would likely require you to run a background check on the buyer to ensure that the buyer were insured. The buyer's insurance company would either allow or prevent the sale, because they, not the seller's insurance company would be assuming liability for the buyer. Selling to an uninsured buyer would put the seller at risk of essentially unlimited lifelong financial liability. Even criminals would think twice.
Many gun owners right now are probably reluctant to sell or give away their guns and ammunition. They may not want the legal or moral responsibility of keeping weaponry in circulation. If gun purchases and sales, through the power of capitalism, were made far less risky, these gun owners could rid themselves of their weaponry without worrying they were circulating a future murder weapon. Or, better, the government, in the interest of public safety, could institute ongoing, permanent buyback or voluntary disposal programs.
Repealing the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act might, imo, put ever forceful "money motivations" on the right side of the gun risk management argument for a change. It might be much more effective than an assault weapons ban at eliminating the proliferation of assault weapons. It might also help settle the "gun issue" that Republicans and the NRA now use to divide the American people.
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