Quote Originally Posted by BigDee View Post
No "Good time" for people sentenced for
Committing crimes involving a gun. If you commit any crime and a firearm is involved you must serve the entire length of your sentence.


Security requirements. Owners of firearms must keep them secured at all times. This would be difficult to enforce however one way to enforce it would be to also pass a law making a firearms owner responsible for any crime committed with their weapon in the event that the firearm owner can not provide proof that the firearm was properly secured. This law may very well have prevented the Newtown shooting, it would have also prevented the Oregon mall shooting.

I would not oppose a training requirement for firearm ownership. The days of parents taking their kids out and teaching them to use a weapon are long gone. While some parents do still teach their kids many dont and many people end up buying guns they have no idea how to operate. My parents are anti gun and I was one of those people at one time.

I also support the idea of having a firearms safety/hunter safety course be made a part of high school curriculum. There are many people who hate guns and will not teach their children about guns as a result. There are also a lot of irresponsible gun owners who allow their kids to have free reign of their fire arms. In the event that a child goes into a home where there are unrestricted firearms that child should know how to act responsibly around those guns. This class would also be sufficient to meet the training requirement for firearm ownership once the child reaches legal age to purchase a firearm.
I'm all for your sentencing requirement.

I am totally against any law mandating securing of firearms. Yes, I believe gun owners should secure their firearms from theft and small children. However, there are a number of reasons why I'm against a law mandating this.

1) It's impractical. Many gun owners own one or two pistols for home protection and many of them probably can't afford a decent enough safe to secure it. Lock boxes will not keep a burglar out. Most of the low end safes are crap and we all know it.

2) There been many a documented case of kids home alone when a home invader broke in and was stopped with a firearm in the kids hands. If you have a gun in the house, smaller kids need to be taught to respect firearms and not to touch them, responsible older ones if they are taught to handle and shoot a gun safely, should know where the house gun is. An anecdote, my father always had loaded guns around the house for HD. Both my brother and I knew where they were and not to touch them. If we wanted to see them, we asked. My dad would then make the gun safe and hand it to us action open. When we were done, he would reload it and put it back. BTW, my father never took either of us shooting when we were kids.

Now I'll add this, the mother of the CT shooter should have had those guns in a safe (maybe she did, nothings come out about this). She definitely had the means (Alimony of $250K/year, IIRC) to purchase a decent one.

I am against a training requirement. For one it doesn't really address the issue at hand, violence. If this were a safety discussion or one about innocent bystanders getting shot, sure. I'll give you a last reason why I'm against it. Many people find themselves under threat (think obsessed ex, angry acquaintance, crazy stalker, crime victim) and go out and buy a gun to protect themselves. Should those people have to wait and risk being harmed or killed, in order to satisfy some useless requirement. Do I think that people should get some sort of training and safety, yes. Should the Govt require you to do so before exercising your right, hell no.

I'm not totally for or against a firearms safety course in high school. I have conflicting thoughts about this and I don't see how this could be a full semester course in HS. How long does it take to teach a safety course, 4-16 hrs?