BD, I respect your right to your beliefs and the fact that you are personally willing to abide by those beliefs, even if it is misguided, as opposed to many of the gun grabbing Hollywood and political types (with their three layers of armed security).
If it works for you, more power, however, let me point out a couple of fallacies.
1) Your giving up your right to own a certain firearm (or spoon for that matter) will do nothing to prevent such atrocities as occurred in TX or NV unless you personally were planning such a dastardly deed, which of course, you are not.
The chances of your firearm falling into the hands of a mass murderer are slim to none, assuming you take normal precautions any responsible firearm owner should, of course.
Furthermore, any law restricting ownership of firearms affects only law abiding citizens, not the criminal preparing for his crime spree. It is just "common sense" (to use the grabbers' own favorite gun control phrase) to realize that violating a gun law is of little concern to a criminal preparing to commit murder which is also against the law! What's one (minor) criminal violation, compared to the (major) violation of the laws against murder?
2) Availability of firearms, contrary to grabbers' claims, does not contribute to the crime rate.
Simple fact is, statistics prove the availability of firearms has no effect on crime rate other than very possibly preventing "a good guy with a gun" terminating the bad guy's spree. Click link below and scroll to page 6 for supporting charts/statistics:
Quote: Myth: The availability of guns causes crime
Fact: Though the number of firearms owned by private citizens has been increasing steadily since 1970, the overall rate of homicides and suicides has not risen.33 As the chart shows, there is no correlation between the availability of firearms and the rates of homicide and suicide in America
https://gunowners.org/pdf/2014gunfacts.pdf
These are just two of the myriad of facts which need to be considered in any intelligent attempt to reduce criminal misuse of firearms or any other tools in the commission of such heinous acts.
And while we are at it, perhaps more attention could/should be given to criminal/mental records as opposed to placing all the blame on inanimate objects.
3) The perpetrator in every mass shooting in the past several years was either mentally troubled, on mind altering drugs, or a brainwashed fanatic.
It would seem to me that targeting such misguided individuals would be much more productive in preventing these tragedies than would gun control. After all, those who have been responsible for many of these attacks around the world have used bombs, gasoline, trucks, etc. with equally deadly results.
The perpetrator of the last tragedy, for instance:
1) Was convicted of Domestic violence, served 12 months in prison and received a "less than honorable" discharge for beating and pointing a loaded firearm at his spouse and hitting his 11 month old son hard enough to crack his skull!
2) Had attempted to smuggle firearms on a military base after making death threats against his chain of command.
3) Had previously escaped from a mental institution in New Mexico.
The warnings were clear, but unfortunately fell through the cracks.
Regards,
hm
