It's been a long time, but let's get down to guns.

As my readers may have noted, I haven't posted for a long time. Having left the shipyard that furnished me with so much soap-boxing material, I had nothing to write about. I have a different job, different employer--still related to the ship repair industry, but not a job I want to write about.

There's an old labor union rhyme that goes,

"The working class can kiss my ass,
I've got the foreman's job at last!"

Need I say anymore? Well, there is a topic that has forced me to dig the soap-box out of the garage, however. It is the subject of guns and gun regulation, and in the process of setting the world straight on this topic, I'm sure to piss off everybody from the NRA to the liberal commentators on National Public Radio.

But first, full disclosure: I am a gun owner. I am not a member of the NRA. I am not a hunter, and have not been since I was about 15 years old (which is probably the mental age of many hunters). I own a .22 magnum cal. Ruger Blackhawk revolver pistol and a 7.62 mm. 91/30 Moisin-Nagant Soviet army rifle of WW II vintage. I also own a couple of black powder cap-and-ball pistols. Plus, I have in my house a 9mm Beretta semi-automatic pistol and a semi-automatic version of the M-4 US military rifle, which if it were automatic could be classified as an assault weapon. These I am storing for a friend, who is a currently serving military officer and to whom they belong. Occasionally--very rarely, in fact--I shoot some of these weapons for target practice. I do not keep any of them for "self-defense" or because I think that someday I may need them to overthrow an oppressive government.

Now, lets get some facts straight, because most of the talking heads on this issue don't know what they are talking about. An automatic weapon is one that continues to fire when you pull the trigger until all the bullets in the magazine are expended (or you release the trigger). A semi-automatic weapon is one that fires one bullet when you pull the trigger, but it chambers another round and cocks the weapon automatically, so that
you can repeatedly pull the trigger until the magazine is empty without having to do anything else.

There is a lot of talk about banning assault rifles because of the recent appalling shooting of schoolchildren in Connecticut. The weapon used there was an AR-15, which is a "civilian," semi-automatic look-alike wannabe for the US Military (fully-automatic) M-16 rifle. But to my way of thinking the AR-15, regardless of what it looks like, is not an assault weapon because it isn't fully automatic and all of the assault rifles of modern armies are fully automatic. (There was a time when a smooth-bore, muzzle-loading musket fitted with a bayonet could have been called an "assault weapon," but not today.)

Now, until recently, I believed that private ownership of any fully automatic weapon was illegal. Now I'm not so sure. Or maybe the laws just aren't being enforced. Anyway, I am against fully automatic weapons being in the hands of civilians. But the uninformed talk about assault weapons is stupid. You can do just as much damage with semi-automatic pistols, such as the Glock or Beretta, or hunting rifles, none of which are  "assault weapons," as you can with an AR-15, because you can pull the trigger just as fast. The only difference is that the clips don't hold as many rounds, but that's not a big problem for a potential shooter because it takes about 2 seconds to change a clip. I will say that I am in favor of limiting the capacity of clips to 8 or 10 rounds, or even less, because there is no legitimate reason to have clips or magazines that are any larger. For the guys who want to pretend they're Rambo, they can still make the same big banana clips so long as they're blocked in such a way as to limit their capacity.

I think the main place that guns need to be controlled, however, is in the ghettos, where most of the guns are illegal anyway, and the young kids are killing each other over drug-dealings (or imitating the drug dealers), or getting killed in the drive by shootings as bystanders. But apart from that, I would have to agree with the NRA that guns do not kill people, people kill people. I don't agree with the NRA that the way to stop the mass killings is to post armed guards in every school--that would create a police state and a permanent climate of fear--not an environment I would wish on any school children. (There might be exceptions--neighborhoods where kids bringing guns into school to settle scores is a real worry and armed guards a necessary evil.)

So how do we stop the killings? Well, the NRA and others are on the right track when they talk about the need to address the problem of mental illness, something a lot more time and money should be devoted to. But that's a long-term solution. In the meantime, instead of new laws for background checks for gun purchases, why not license the potential gun owner? I mean, you have to have a driver's license to drive a car. Why not a gun owner's license before you can buy or own a gun? That way, the background check would be done only one time--including a check on possible mental problems (granted, how to do this would not be easy to figure out). This would be an advantage to the NRA folk, once they had a license, they could go out and buy guns without any further difficulty.