> Sadly, instead of having better laws we get fallacy rhetoric by people who probably have never touched, much less fired a gun in their lives.
Why is this the litmus test for being qualified to write gun legislation? Do we also expect our lawmakers to have tried heroin or downloaded child porn so that they can regulate those activities?
> Do we also expect our lawmakers to have tried heroin or downloaded child porn so that they can regulate those activities?
It would be nice if they delegated to experts, instead of think tanks or populism, when it came to dealing with these. Both are examples of rampant regulatory failure.
This is a bad example. I've been notionally pro-ownership but also pro-regulation my whole life, and one of the major problems with gun legislation in the US is that it's incredibly poorly written and does not reflect the technical reality of guns.
The government allows private ownership of automatic weapons, but hasn't issued any new tax stamps for 50 years. You can convert any semiauto gun into a full-auto gun for a few cents of 3D printed parts (or a rubber band). The hysteria over "assault weapons" basically outlawed guns that _looked_ scary, while not meaningfully making anyone safer.
I think yes, it is reasonable for Congresspeople to fire a gun before they legislate on it, because otherwise they are incapable of writing good laws.
Good gun regulation in the US would probably look like car insurance, where gun owners need to register and insure their weapons against the possibility of crimes being committed with them. There are so many guns compared to the amount of gun crime that it would probably not end up terribly expensive, especially if you own a gun safe.
> The hysteria over "assault weapons" basically outlawed guns that _looked_ scary, while not meaningfully making anyone safer.
This wasn't the goal by the congresspeople, and that them having fired a gun would've changed that goal.
That was the goal. They knew they weren't going to be able to pass any kind of legislation that actually msde people safer, but they wanted to look like they were "doing something".
This is incredibly common. It's the primary reason behind the TSA and its continuous expansion, for example.
Thats defacto gun registration- and worse: registration with a private entity not beholden to due process. Given current realities, anybody who registers their firearm in such a manner can expect a no-knock raid because they were nearby when somebody phoned in an engine backfire as a gunshot.
So make it allowed that the insurance is tied to the gun. You buy a lifetime policy for that serial number, provide payment, and you're done. Payment can be provided anonymously at a window in cash, if that's your thing.
If you want discounts because you live in a low-crime area, have a gun safe, have many guns, etc. then obviously the storage location for the weapon needs to be declared to the insurance company.
You're welcome to come up with a better litmus test, but it's beyond clear that lawmakers writing gun control regulation have less than a wikipedia level understanding of the topic. See "shoulder thing that goes up", the weird obsession with the Thompson, the entire concept of an Assault Weapon, etc.
Wikipedia has much better information about guns than most of the people talking about them in politics, generally speaking.
It's not too surprising, considering the way the rules are written at the ATF. There's basically zero logical thought that goes into pistol vs rifle vs felony:
ATF rulemaking can be unintuitive and arbitrary but there really is a level below it occupied by people who have dedicated a significant chunk of their lives to trying to restrict firearm ownership, who genuinely seem to believe that Die Hard, Rambo, and Spaghetti Westerns are real life. Politicians who can't answer basic questions about their legislation, who have to be told live on air that magazines can be repacked, that just make up impossible crime statistics. Yeah it's stupid that the ATF has decided that vertical grips are a rifle feature but angled grips aren't, but it gets worse.
In this specific discussion familiarity does seem relevant. I don't think shooting is so relevant, but printing and assembling are.
You don't have to be a life-long user to regulate heroin, but if you start legislating second-hand heroin smoke, people might look at you sideways. You kinda need to know a little even if you've never actually ever seen heroin. If you demonstrate severe ignorance, people are going to call you on it.
litmus test wise, regulators of 3d printing should be able to create strong parts with a variety of 3d printing mechanisms.
they should at least be able to understand that a 3d printer is akin to a turing machine and what the real limits are - strength of the printed material vs length of the strip of memory.
It’s more like people who barely use computers regulating software features and development.. oh wait
I don’t own a gun, and think guns should be regulated more and better, but the heroin let alone another one are just flawed. There are no legitimate, non-life-ruining use cases for either of those analogies.
Why is this the litmus test for being qualified to write gun legislation? Do we also expect our lawmakers to have tried heroin or downloaded child porn so that they can regulate those activities?