Moviestar, you do seem like a wide-eyed college kid who has grown up in an increasingly far left school system we have in America. When I was your age, I believed as you did. You think you look at both sides of the issue, but the way you have been educated you actually spend most of your time learning from liberal professors and liberal news media. I would appeal to your sense of reason and obvious intelligence, by asking you to read this excellent article: http://www.thefreemanonline.org/feat...-exceptions-2/

Once the government forces you to register a gun with them, they know exactly who has what gun, and can move to take them from you. It doesn't happen all at once. It starts with handguns and high caliber semi-auto rifles and goes from there. This actually happened in England very recently (during the lifetime of your college professors). They just made the last of them illegal (hunting rifles and shotguns) in the last decade.

The key consideration is government and its all-consuming need to control. You obviously trust President Obama and other members of government to do the right thing. For instance you say that anyone has the right to plead their case to get permission to get a firearm. This trust in government is a fatal error. Once you give government the right to say who can and who can't possess any given firearm, you have abridged the individual right of the people to keep and bear arms (the Supreme Court recently clarified that it is most definitely an individual right). Government, like any wild beast, grows larger and larger as it consumes more and more of our resources and controls more and more of our daily lives. Today, they may let some citizens who are well connected with politicians have the right to keep a gun. Tomorrow they may decide that they may not keep it, or that only those who pay an exorbitant tax may keep their arms.

Please do some reading of the other side of this debate. You have obviously not done any to date. I can't believe you waded through 45 pages of this raving left wing organization and still call yourself centrist. Please spend as much time reading what organizations like the NRA and Gun Owners of America have to say, and I have no doubt that with your intelligence you will begin to see what organizations like MAIG are all about.