Newtown School Shootings

[Montmorency]

1. Mental illness (cf. ACIN).
2. Most guns used in such crimes are illegally acquired. Regulating legal weapons however stringently will never reduce the supply or ease of access to this market.
3. There are too many guns within the United States to ever have hope of effecting a serious ban of any nature. We might as well try to burn all books - a long ordeal.
4. Legislation spurred by catastrophe is always worse than well-considered and soberly-analysed legislation.

There, I think I've regurgitated Panzerjaeger's points.

Now, perhaps the easy way out would simply be to institute an examination for gun owners, as well as a license, in the style of drivers' licenses and exams. Renewals might be every 5 years. All new guns sold would need to be registered. To undercut the black market, it would be necessary to make the process simple and easy in a way not wholly detrimental to the selective process itself. Otherwise, many would always simply turn to criminality.

I can't imagine a way to accomplish this - the regulations and tests would appear as a joke. What would the effect be Rather than regulating the legal market, it seems to make more sense to go for curtailing the illegal market, and that makes no sense because, well, how the heck could it be done? A War on Guns?!

There aren't easy ways out, and we shouldn't search for them - it's counterproductive in every way. Mental illness aside, bans must be cast aside as an option and any new controls and restrictions considered should be very specific as to ways, means, and ends, in what they intend to accomplish and how. Well-meaning blanket legislation never works, fellows.

So which is the straw man, the war on terror or that the US has more gun deaths then any other western nation per capita?

The War on Terror is indeed a strawman. It is wasteful and unnecessary. The problem is minimal, though theatrical and dramatic. Islamic terrorists have never seriously endangered the country or even substantially increased the risk of using any means of transportation. The proper response to 9/11 would simply have been to increase funding for the FBI and CIA, and prioritize their function as to monitor for local cells and lone wolves in the country, and to reduce abroad the operational capacity of large and coherent terrorist franchises. At the very most, a black-ops raid in Afghanistan and select other states as a show of power and to eliminate some of the leadership. Otherwise, life should have gone on as normal. Anyway, if the number of gun deaths is empirically small the per-capita rate shouldn't concern anyone overmuch.

I don't know where you live, but obviously not in the US. It was taxation without representation that riled up the elites. They felt they were proper British citizens (aristocrats even) and deserved to be treated as such. That's why you saw motions such as the Olive Branch Petition to prevent all out war in the first place. No one wanted war, they only wanted a democratic voice and were happy to pay taxes as long as they could redress their concerns.

The schoolbook variant. Most of the more 'radical' revolutionaries, the ones who fomented in the first place, had a significant financial stake in eliminating British mercantilistic competition.

Finally, articles on the psychology of These People:

http://www.psychology.uiowa.edu/stud...CJS%202008.pdf
http://jaapl.org/content/38/1/87.full.pdf+html
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/...86.2011.581523

Introversion, narcissism, persecution complexes, and extensive prior criminal records.