Gonna have to do some chopping, we're getting rather long again



Let me cut you off here, all the physical forces have 'infinite range' - in theory anyway - but the also propagate at c or slower, gravity included, those place we can't see anymore can't every gravitationally effect us further. If I magically conjure another gas giant into the solar system it's gravity wouldn't effect us until the light from it got here. The stuff that red shifts beyond the Observable Universe is still sending light and gravity our way, but neither will ever reach us or effect us.



One could argue that it no longer exists, since it can not be detected in any fashion. For all practical purposes it may as well be an alternate Universe, those probably exist too. If the Universe is defined as all there is everywhere and when, then sure, it exists, but that's the definition we use for Multiverse or the Whole Shebang.



The core concept here is that Observable Universe is very important philosophically, is that if something can not interact in any fashion it can't conceivably be detected and thus discussing whether or not it is real becomes beyond academic. The universe seems to conspire to make the individual observer the only legitimate baseline for observation and I've always found that shiveringly solipsistic.



Only if mind is taken as automatically synonymous to 'brain', rather than just as 'the part of I that thinks', which is cheerfully flexible, since it can include all of you or simply your brain or some supernatural quantity.



It's never been claimed - by anyone reasonably modern and serious anyway - that people's senses are totally accurate. Accuracy of observation isn't included as a necessity of one's ability to interact with the world around you and draw conclusions. A core think here is that those senses aren't lying to you, they are dutifully functioning within their physical limits, and your interpretation of the data is based on those mechanical limitations and your own incomplete interpretation. If your senses were lying to you we'd be in a different discussion altogether, one of the various variations of brain in a tank.



Existence must be treated as a given, else there would be very little point in discussing it. That doesn't mean it is definitely so, there are detailed criticisms of this by guys like Bernard Williams if you want to review them. Not even including that in a totally natural, non-supernatural universe 'thought' has to be considered a totally arbitrary and meaningless concept, something I've always found vaguely amusing as a person who is trained to apply thought to determine the natural workings of the Universe. "I" and "think" do not actually appear to be noteworthy quantities in our universe.



Can't help but think Lucas, the only one 'justified' to do it, did it worse than anyone else. Leading me to believe most writers (Like Brandon Sanderson) who get to follow up face shitloads of unfair criticism. I've usually enjoyed Expanded Universe stuff from almost anyone.



Okay, you listed 3 things there but I'm afraid you misunderstood what I meant by 'competence' in this case, I was thinking the 'adult of sound mind' aspect. Your specific three are fine by me, though I'd do it differently, in terms of competent to fire a weapon. For one thing, a blind man may buy a car, he just may not personally operate it on public roads, which is what a license lets you do. Remember that Castle Doctrine is a very real and important thing in US law and of course our common morality. A person need not have a license to own a car, just to operate it on public property, if we were talking permit to carry (concealed or otherwise) on public property then we're in a different sphere then purchase, or carry/use on private property. My hypothetical 15 year old daughter can not buy a pistol nor drive a car on the road, but she may certainly fire a pistol (anyone may in self-defense even felons) under my direction on my property or someone's private gun range, if they permit it. Same I'm pretty sure she can own a car, but she may certainly drive on my property with my permission and supervision, though I'm not sure the latter is actually required. So I think in this regard we'd be talking 'competent to operate' and that it would have to apply only to public ground. From a realistic perspective I'd want to train my kid in gun safety, especially pistols, from a relatively young age, and were I legally blind for instance I'd actually consider it more important since I couldn't protect them as well. I'd also feel pretty infringed on if my aim, as a legally blind but sound of mind adult, someone told me that even though I can make out people decently a ten feet I can't own/operate a gun when an awful lot of self-defense cases take place at that proximity. Hell a blind man could make a good case to me that he doesn't need to be able to see to shoot a mugger who is physically touching him and speaking, not exactly a freakishly uncommon and unlikely situation.

In any event though I meant 'mentally competent', outside of very severe and obvious cases where the person shouldn't be allowed in public without a minder, if at all, it's getting into shaky ground for me to determine if they are or not.



'Shooting without a license' is a non-existent thing. So is driving without a license, because that's actually operating a motor vehicle on public roads/property without permission (license) to do so. If the 2nd amendment didn't exist, then that would be legal and parallel, to ban carry or operation of a gun on public property. It would still be different then purchase and would still run into the issue that it is very hard to establish routine carrying of a gun represents a plausible hazard to the public. Whereas routine operation of a car obviously does. It is already illegal to simply discharge a firearm on public property or someone else's private property without their permission, or even on your property in a manner that can easily translate to someone else's property, like an apartment building, that just gets overridden for self-defense. But your example is void, I can not simply walk up and down the street randomly firing into the air or even waving the gun around. We've already got laws for that. We also hit the difference that operating a car is an entirely different cup of tea from a gun. Routine gun use is simply carrying the weapon, exposing no realistic risk to others, routine car operation does expose people to danger.




'without testing' is a big bad assumption there.



Probably a couple hundred unless its balsa wood, if nails are people...



There's hypocrisy from our perspective in basing rules around spree killers, since they are a themselves 'anomalous exceptions'. Your odds of ever even encountering one, even just let them bum your lighter for a second, are very low. Your odds of being involved with a violent crime (committing, suffering, directly witnessing) are far higher than your odds of ever even sitting in the same diner with a spree killer. From our perspective it is absolutely those who worry about spree killers who are jumping at anomalies, and we already have what we view as a non-ideal but more viable way of handling them... get a gun, get a concealed permit, learn to use it, shoot the bad guy mugger or mass murderer.



People abuse the hell out of stats but in my experience the gun-control ones are worse about it. Now, I do like to differentiate gun control, I might disagree with someone who wants a license to carry a loaded gun on public property but it's sane and reasonable, at least if the grounds for license set terms the majority of the populace would meet, alternatively people who bring up home deaths and include deliberate suicides are falsifiers and manipulators and people who overly focused on magazine size or auto/semi are just kind of ignorant of how guns operate or firefights proceed. Then you've got the sorts who are just overwhelmed by the numbers, and see spree killers as a major cause of death when realistically being struck by lightning is higher. These are all very different ducks and I feel type 2 sorts are tricking types 3 and 4 and a lot of type 1's go along because they are convinced they can get what they consider 'sane laws' passed by riding the tide and offering the compromise.



Half a year is six months, we don't do meaningful stat analysis off every other that way. If two happen on the same day we do not say 'in the past day we've averaged 2 shootings a day', that's just bad stats. We look at a sample, traditionally less than 3 digits is very hazy and there's a reason I tend to sneer at statistical studies of twenty people. Might as well say Y is the most common letter used based of a sample of six, the word 'syzygy'. You look at a whole random page/paragragph, compare it to another random one, and if both show similiar results then you say, 'Oh, it's the Wheel of fortune auto-letters'



Like I said, I'd really need to see the whole discussion word for word, especially without you being a self-admitted non-expert, to be able to say 'this guys is a moron', and even then I'd prefer to have the gun in question on hand or at least a good schematic to feel comfortable saying 'nope' as opposed to 'hadn't thought of that'.



Not really what I was saying I'm afraid. I essentially consider all adult or near adult humans 'proven threats' to me and thus presumably public safety too. By God or Evolution we're an absurdly dangerous lot, and excluding those who are batshit-crazy or pretty crazy but crazy in a violent way I don't really consider your average convicted murderer much different then your average teenage kid. I definitely recognize mens rea I'm just not too sure about the 'criminal mind', tends to strike me as Phrenology v 2.0. I'm more concerned about people with a streak for irrational behavior then specific acts. Heck of a lot safer with a hypothetical professional mafia assassin then a girlfriend with a history of flipping out who thinks you've cheated on her.

What's relevant here is not punishment, when talking about gun control, because a gun is simply not a covert way of killing someone. They are stupid loud and draw attention and 911 calls. We're talking about crime prevention, making sure it doesn't happen, and that comes down to keeping guns out of the hands of someone who might use on for murder. Our problem is that, realistically, that's a lot of people, millions at least, and I would actually bet includes somewhere between 50% and 99.9% of the adult population. Various unforeseeable events pushed some of these people over the line and pushed some back from the cliff and some people that cliff is closer, realistically. I don't believe we have the means to screen for them, except where it is so damn obvious no expert screening is necessary or where their prior activities making it easy. Most of these guys really didn't stand out, and frankly I don't trust the hindsight 20/20 view, even less so knowing how fickle and malleable people's memories of their own attitude toward someone are. Give me high-quality film of someone's face all day long and I'll find a snapshot that makes them look like a villain and give me a touch of airbrushing I can make them look like a malevolent psychopath. And the human memory does a lot of airbrushing.

So, I'm just not confident we could realistically screen for those people. We might net some, sure, but it strikes me as something with massively diminishing returns. Triple the effort to get 10% more isn't usually a good use of limited resources.



Only in fiction. In reality if they know someone owns 3 specific guns they can come in and demand them on penalty of pain, if they know X simply owns a gun they can demand it, get one sacrificial, and not the others. As for outright searches, let me tell you how fucking hard it is to search out weapon caches sometime as an occupying army.... seriously, pin, haystack. People know a search is occurring they hide it under the floorboards or in a hole in the ground and proper searches of a home take hours by skilled searchers. Hundred million homes, probably 2 man hours to search a home properly for something gun sized, 2000 man hours a year a person... one hundred thousand trained searchers working full time for a year... yeah, not happening. More importantly though not happening over night, police and the like are relying on limited planning and coordination and cooperation and not much time. Hard to find someone's buried cache of rebel stuff if it's in a box in a field with a foot of dirt over it unless it happened recent enough you can't see it. Heaven forbid someone wraps the cache in asbestos or one of the other things that utterly screws a metal detector.



You would find that odd... they can demand you inform them of weapons on you and you are legally required to inform them of concealed weapons. This is like hitting a brick wall man, beyond just the whole 2nd amendment thing, a car is a device that's normal routine operation is dangerous and that routine operation requires use of public roads. There's nothing notably dangerous about a safed pistol in a holster. A person isn't going to accidentally discharge it into someone walking by them on the street, not any any significant rate. A gun on public property is 99.99% of the time not 'in use', a car is damn near the reverse. And no discharge of a gun on public property ever goes investigated. You don't have to prove you have a license to sit in a car or help push one down the road, you need it to operate the thing on the public road. A cop can't ask you - outside of hot pursuit - for license and registration of a car you're not operating. They damn well can do the same thing with a gun when it gets 'operated', it's not like you could fire one into the air on the sidewalk and just tell the cops 'Yeah, no, just bored'

As to the rest. Ballistic fingerprinting is over-rated, but again I have no problem with the FBI keeping its file and I've no problem with them having a database consisting of, say, and ID# column and a Y/N column where everyone's ID has that number somewhere and us making it a crime to sell a weapon without checking that database and a bigger crime to dell to the people with the 'N' in there. I wouldn't want it to be name and I'd prefer it not be people's SSN or license number, just some other randomly assigned number stuck on the ID, because I don't think anyone should be able to just look that up unless they are involved in the transaction. These sort of case-specific ID #'s get a lot easier with modern tech, an ID card might have dozens of little logo-bar codes tied into publicly accessible databases. I don't think it would be too effective though.



A certain political faction assumes criminals aren't universally stupid and people without felony records can be criminals. John, clean record, buys a gun, sells it to his friend with one. Even if we know John bought that specific gun its going to be very hard to prove in court if he's not a moron... thank god most criminals, caught or not, are... 'I lost it' 'I didn't even know it got stolen' or even 'Officers, I'd like to report a robbery' are pretty solid covers with burden of proof and all, and that's only effective if serial numbers are tracked, and can't just be filed off. There's damn little reason for an unconvicted felon to be afraid of punishment for re-sell unless they're literally making it a major business. Hence why I don't consider bans for minority groups very effective. I mean it barely works for cigarettes and that mostly because teens don't have the cash to overpay a blackmarket vendor for a consumable good, you only need to buy a gun once.



I find it amusing that you think the right wing trusts the NRA less than the government when it comes to guns



I agree with that argument, and would restate the whole concept of if they are on the street they are in a position to acquire a firearm non-conventionally. Lots of times it's a relative or lover/spouse/roommate they got it off of, there's no sane way to screen those out, and then there's the whole breaking and entering, black market, etc routes.



I doubt it would, look, a person plotting murder who can legally buy a gun will probably end up killing people with a legal gun, same as if I could acquire grenades legally I will use legal grenades rather than hunting for black market ones or homemade sorts. All that really means is people follow the path of least resistance and will pick a legal weapon over an illegal one if they think the illegal one is equal or insufficiently better for the task. If a man dreamed of murdering people with an AK specifically, it's quite possible a ban on them specifically but not M16's might make him pick a M16 instead of seeking out an illegal AK, it's very unlikely though he'd just give up his homicidal dream.



See notes on 'mandatory database' re: dictatorship, black market, theft.



Systematic training where gun safety is concerned is mostly about building in what amount to faux pas, one of the reasons I'd rather do it young and for almost everyone where that sort of stuff is way more effective and can be done by nearly any adult. Also I feel I've utterly rebutted the notion that a driver's license has jack realistic parallels to a gun. Also Missouri is the only state I know of that makes it legal to handle a firearm while intoxicated so the DUI comparison is weak at best.