They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Not my words, but that of Benjamin Franklin.

And you need to come up with something better than, “Times (Franklin’s time) were different back then.”

First, it may surprise you that I favor “stop and frisk” with some ground rules to prevent abuse.

Every bullet signaturized for tracing purposes. Heavy excise tax on ammo. I checked to see how much it cost the shooter in Aurora to buy 6,000 rounds of high caliber ammo online. I assumed a dollar or so per projectile. It was more like 35 cents.

Every firearm registered. Every change of possession (store to person, or person to person) immediately goes into a computer data base system, with photo ID’s of buyer and seller. Similar to the FBI national crime data base. Include ability to identify individuals involved in high frequency transactions and the guns associated with those transactions. This is all for purposes of tracing a gun’s ownership history when used in a crime, not so Obama can sent stormtroopers to confiscate guns.

When a crime is committed with a gun, civil liability rests with the most recent legal owner (unless the gun was previously reported stolen). So, if a gun is legally purchased in Georgia and then goes through a series of unregistered transactions and finds its way into an armed robbery in Richmond, whoever made the original legally documented purchase back in Georgia gets to lose his shirt in a lawsuit and also be subject to criminal charges for an undocumented transfer.

Tightened rules on gun show sales and high frequency or multiple-gun transactions.

I don’t necessarily disagree with you John, but how would you propose that we do that?

Second, we have the street killings that happen daily in places like Oakland, Richmond, San Francisco etc. The tragedy of these is not just the victims (some innocent, some not) but also what it does to the community. Kids not being able to play outside. Some sleeping in bathtubs instead of beds. Unsafe schools. It must be hell trying to grow up in that environment. Every gun used in those crimes started as a legal gun sale somewhere and then found itself in the black market. We need to deal aggressively with that.