The unfortunate thing about this new gun control group is that from their website, they want the following:

1. Require a criminal background check for every gun sold in America
2. Ban assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines
3. Make gun trafficking a federal crime, with real penalties for “straw purchasers”

This, sadly, is a wasted effort. There already are criminal background checks for guns sold, with the sole exception of private to private sales within the same state. Since it's inception, over 107 million background checks have been conducted, and only 1.8% of these checks prevented a gun sale to be completed.

These criminal background checks were established in 1993 with the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act. It was named after James Brady, who was shot by John Hinckley, Jr. in his assassination attempt on President Reagan.

I should note that the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act wouldn't have prevented Brady from getting shot, because Hinckley wasn't a criminal when he purchased his guns. He was just insane.

By the way, Hinckley's family came from wealth. Hinckley's father even ran an oil company. If you enjoy conspiracy theories, just for their entertainment value alone, google the conspiracy that the assassination attempt on Reagan was planned by George H.W. Bush so he could become President.

To my knowledge, Jared Lee Loughner didn't have a criminal record either prior to shooting Gabby, so this wouldn't have prevented her from getting shot.

What WOULD have prevented this, is if we included regular psychological evaluations for every American in the United States as part of their basic health care coverage. Every couple years, every American should get regular physicals as well as regular psychological evaluations. And we certainly shouldn't allow mentally disturbed people to have access to guns.

Their 2nd proposal is to ban "assault weapons", and "high capacity" magazines. Which makes me wonder how people, who don't likely know much about guns, are defining these terms.

http://www.guns.com/2011/12/08/media-uses-fake-guns-from-halo-to-criticize-assault-weapons/

The normal capacity for most 9mm handguns are 15-17 rounds. A Glock 19 holds 17 rounds, and the magazine does not stick out of the gun. A Beretta 92 holds 17 rounds as well. Most of the people who insist on limiting magazine capacity say we should limit this to 10 rounds, which is the California standard. Yet this standard in California hasn't been effective in limiting California's gun violence. California has the 4th highest rate of firearm homicides in the country.

Banning "assault weapons" depends on how you define them. Often this means "full auto". While fully automatic rifles are legal in most states, the regulations and fees required to purchase one makes it practically impossible for most gun owners. The only people who usually bother to purchase them are gun ranges or related businesses. I would also note that fully auto firearms, have to my knowledge, almost never been used in a crime. This is because fully auto weapons are useless and a waste of ammo, unless you're on a battle field.

More often than not, people like Diane Feinstein are defining "assault weapons" as "scary looking guns". It has little, if anything to do with how the gun actually functions.

Can you spot the assault rifle here?

http://the_rat.blogspot.com/2012/12/can-you-identify-assault-rifle.html

Lastly, gun trafficking is already a crime. In my home state of Virginia, it's a mandatory minimum of 5 years behind bars for having an illegal gun on you. While I certainly think that something should be done to strengthen these laws, we shouldn't pretend that they don't exist. And if they do, we should ask why aren't they working?

None of these proposals would have prevented Gabby from getting shot. They wouldn't have prevented Tucson. They wouldn't have prevented James Holmes in Aurora. They wouldn't have prevented Sandy Hook.

In each of these cases, these tragedies happened because a severely mentally disturbed person got their hands on a gun. If our goal is to prevent these kind of events in the future, then it is a wasted effort to focus on the guns. Rather, we should focus on mental illness.

Most importantly, we need to ask ourselves, why do these sort of events almost always happen in the United States? In nations like Japan and Sweden, only about 8% of their population has mental illness of some kind. In the United States, we have mental illness rates that are three times higher.

I think it would behoove us to ask would Tucson, Aurora, and Sandy Hook had ever happened if the shooters were never mentally ill in the first place?

Most Americans are (sadly) not well versed in abnormal psychology (the study of mental illness). They think that mental illness is something we can't prevent. Or that it can only be cured with drugs. They don't realize that mental illness can be caused by your environment. People don't develop phobias unless they encounter a traumatic event. Soldiers don't get PTSD unless they go to a battle field. Children who grow up in nurturing and loving homes don't become psychopaths. The same is likely true of many personality disorders.

The United States has the highest rate of mental illness out of any industrialized country on earth. We're number one in crazy. It shouldn't be a surprise that a nation that is number one in crazy will see these kind of horrible events happen over and over and over again.

Perhaps we should ask ourselves, why are we number one in crazy? I believe that this is the answer to that question:

http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson.html

Oh sure, let's have Kerry be our international representative. His penchant for convenient injury, empty political gestures, affinity for dictators, and experience in marriages of convenience, make him the perfect surrogate for this administration.