Nut Cases and the Second Amendment

The question is what to do about the Second Amendment in light of Cho The Crazy South Korean?

You can pass all the gun control laws you want but can't either predict or even know when someone is going to go off the deep end. One reasonable law which I would support would be surrender for safe keeping of all handguns if you have an active restraining order against you. This means keeping a list however, and that list can cause all kinds of mischief. Perhaps this would have solved this perhaps not. While recriminations will not bring anyone back, a good after action analysis will make response better in the future. It will also result in the VaTech Chief of Police getting a more appropriate job, like mall security guard.

Personally, I do not want the government regulating guns because they do such an honest and even-handed job regulating everything else. However, handguns do need more direct regulation, and I can't believe I am saying it. Banning them may not be a good answer, since there are millions more honest, law abiding citizens who own handguns, and it is simply wrong to take their property without them doing anything wrong. However, the right to carry concealed flintlock rifles and small bore cannon cannot be restricted by our government.

I own three rifles and one handgun. My handgun is a Colt Model 1911 .45 caliber military pistol. I do not keep it loaded in the house. I worry about that because nothing is more useless than an unloaded handgun. . . a member of the british royal family perhaps, but they generally don't stop by the house.

My prayers go out to the members of the VaTech family, and all the other families who lost members to gun violence. Simply put, we do not need to really ban guns, we can simply create draconian penalties for the use of the weapons. We do not need to harass law abiding citizens, what we can do is imprison the idiots who use guns in the commission of crimes. Minimum 20 year term of the use of a gun in a crime. One sure thing about incarceration, the recidivism rate is pretty low when one is behind bars. I am tired of the whole sorry ass 'poor inner city' young corrupted by a culture of violence,bad childhoods, yada yada yada. Life was no picnic for me, or a lot of people I know but we did not take to gangs and guns to show our manliness. Do the crime, do the time is my motto.

I'd rather pay $100,000 a year to keep a violent gangbanger in jail, than $100,000 to schedule a convocation at a high school or college after a tragedy.

'Everyone' saw the warning signs and people actually did something in this case. . . there is just a limit as to how far a free society can go in detaining people like Cho. I'm sorry. Lots of people are sorry. I wish there was a way to stop people like him from going postal; it were not a gun, it would be a knife, a sharkgun, or poison or some weapon. People like Cho find a way.