[hermit22]

I really couldn't have said it better, X. I would like to add a few thoughts though.

I've seen the NRA try to use scare tactics a hundred times, but the most blatant was a recent report saying that mandatory waiting periods were inherently bad because they would not allow newly independent battered wives to protect themselves. (The press release degenerated from there into random and disgusting rhetoric that I don't feel like getting into.) What it doesn't say, though, is that these waiting periods are just as exclusionary toward the pissed off husband. It also doesn't consider the idea of a newly single woman who is completely clueless about a gun. Would it not be advantageous to train someone? Obviously, it would have to be a graduated program; first time gun buyers would go through something more intensive than someone with his third or fourth gun.

The other part of my idea is that a dramatic effort has to be made to convince people that there's no point in having guns. There are statistics to prove that most gun owners don't know how to use them, and that a significant percentage of robberies where the owner has a gun result in the owner's injury. The cat may be out of the bag, but that doesn't mean we can't skin it.

As a final note, I never used to care about guns. I had a boy's fascination with them in the "loud things that go boom" sense. But after having one held to my head, and having a slug's entry into the ceiling above me rain plaster onto my hair, and having another one enter the wall about an inch from my head, I cannot accept them as anything but tools of the weak to impose their disproportionate will on others. I may be a bit biased, but I am steadfast in that belief. If I could destroy every weapon on the planet, I would. I would dedicate my life to doing so. But in the meantime, I think the measures I described above are fair, and the only reason the NRA opposes it is the simple-minded fear of the slippery slope, as if everything was black and white.