Gun Rights

I've been finding that lately I've been questioning basic assumptions that I've held since I was young. One of those assumptions is that Gun Control is a good idea and helps reduce crime and protect the general population. I know that this assumption came from my parents. When my parents moved to Florida several years ago, my father meet several people in his community that regularly went Trap Shooting. My dad tried this and enjoyed it, eventually purchasing his own shotgun. When he passed, I inherited his shotgun. Now that I was a "gun owner" I thought that it was import that I reflect on how I feel about owning a gun. After much thinking and research I came to the follow conclusions:

1. guns are not inherently "evil"
2. most gun control laws were initial written or enacted to allow for groups to commit human rights violations. In the United State, especially in the south, many gun control laws can be traced to keeping guns out of the hands of African Americans so that members of the KKK would not get shot when they went to lynch someone.
3. Self defense is a basic human right
4. During the 20th century more people have been murdered by there own governments (http://www.jpfo.org/filegen-a-m/deathgc.htm) than have been murdered as a "crime" by fellow citizens. These murders are always proceed by gun control. One of the goals of the Nazi gun control laws were to make resistance to the Nazi government impossible. This is one of the reasons that uprisings among the Jewish population in Nazi occupied lands were very uncommon.
5. Gun control laws don't prevent criminals from obtaining or using guns to commit crimes. If someone intends to commit a crime such as armed robbery or murder, they generally will not be stopped by a law prohibiting ownership of a gun. Look at D.C., they have very strict gun control laws but still have a huge number of crimes committed with guns.

One of the problems is that groups that wish to control access to guns work to confuse the issue and the general population. The assault weapon ban of 1994 (which expired in 2004) was a perfect example of this.

There is a military class of weapons call "Assault Rifles" which an automatic M-16 would be an example. There is a similar rifle that is available to civilian as only a semi-automatic version called an AR-15, which has been referred to as an "Assault Weapon" but many people do use these rifles as hunting rifles. Cosmetically, the two rifles look similar, but functionally they are very different. The M-16 is a select fire weapon. That means that there is a selector switch which can be used to select how many bullets are fired for each pull of the trigger, with one of these options being fully automatic. A fully automatic rifle is one in which as long as you hold down the trigger, the gun will continue to fire until it is out of ammunition.

The AR-15 is a semi-automatic rifle. For each pull of the trigger, the gun will only fire one bullet. If you want to fire more than one bullet, you must pull the trigger more than once, releasing the trigger between each pull.

Now with a name like the Assault Weapon Ban, you'd think that it would ban fully automatic assault rifles, but it didn't. In fact it did nothing about fully automatic rifles. If you could afford to purchase one, and pay a $200 transfer tax, you could still have an automatic rifle.

What it did do, is restrict inexpensive guns that had cosmetic similarities to fully automatic rifles. What I think is interested and appalling, is that the effect (and intent) of many of gun laws is to prohibit gun ownership by the poor. And in many respects a lot of gun legislation creates two classes of people, privileged and allowed to have guns and unprivileged and denied their second amendment rights.

Why is Senator Webb allow to carry a concealed handgun in the District of Columbia, but other CHP (Concealed Handgun Permit) holders are not? They have both been through the same background checks?

Why do states not honor the full faith and credit clause of the constitution when it come to a CHP? CHP holders are statically less likely to commit a crime than police officers, who are allow to carry concealed in all 50 states. States honor the full faith and credit clause of the constitution with driver's licenses, yet more people (by far) are kill with cars than with guns.