A Different Solution For Gun Crimes

Credit New York Times and the White House
Seriously, look at the way he's holding the gun.
He may shoot, but he's got a pretty weird form.

I've been thinking about the possible solutions to ways to try to introduce some type of law that could curb crimes.

Given President Obama's call during last night's State of The Union Address where he said "They deserve a vote!," and the gallery countered "We deserve a vote!," I think I should tackle this issue right now.

Granted things are in a bad state of affairs, even close to home. Omaha is quickly becoming as bad as Chicago. But when I think about Diane Feinstein's list of weapons that she would like to ban, it seems like she wants to ban all the guns listed in modern video games.

Now, I'm no gamer, but I know that in the beginning levels you get some pretty crappy guns. And some should rightly not be banned. Other should.

But knowing that guns used by teens to kill other teens are usually semi-automatic hand guns I can't help but wonder, how does one take these guns out of crimes involving minors and put them to good use.

My answer to this question is to make them high value limited distribution commodities. The only legislation to do this would be to ban the sale of semi-automatic hand guns from manufacturers to citizens.

Manufacturers could sell to the military and to police departments and certain certified agencies, but not to individual citizens for either personal, recreational, or business use.

Guns have value to me for recreation, historical value, and personal defense use and should be well regulated to these areas with the utmost care.

Now, if Remmington stopped selling guns individually I believe that instantly guns that were previously sold would instantly gain market value thus causing owners to take better care in protecting their weapons from unauthorized use.

Alternatively, this would cause bullet prices to rise for these guns and also keep them out of the easy reach of the those with bad intents. Gun safe prices would be expected to fluctuate to highs and lows too, because individuals would be more obligated to keep their high priced semi-automatic guns protected.

Basically this plan used the power of economics to keep guns controlled not the government. To me this is a bigger win that needs to be proposed in more legislation; utilizing the power of economics in various markets.

 I believe this plan to be originally mine, inspired by only myself. I believe too that this plan could easily be passed on both sides of the aisle.

Just to clarify, not all semi-automatic weapons will cease flow. Individuals could buy manual hand guns and long barrel guns and I would promote that to the grave.

Clearly though, police departments and the military would require semi-automatic pistols, along with many many special use cases that just cannot be discussed here for the sake of brevity.

But I feel it would be appropriate to allow these police departments and other high volume buyers to sell these guns again to the individuals that use them at a reduced cost--thus allowing the market to be replenished, and allowing good citizens to have the guns they worked so hard to have at a much much lower price and making it easy for these same individuals to serve their interests and close one's protection.

This plan provides for individuals at the distributing party (the police department) to judge the responsibility of those that are actually taking guns home on a very personal basis, much better than a required background check. Although, I believe that in combination with a background check the system produced would be supremely effective.

All in all, if this plan were implemented with a centrist to conservative weapons ban and required background checks we could indeed have a very effective long term solution to first getting guns out of the hands that do not know how to use them and second establishing, building, and supporting a strong and effective base of gun owners.