I agree that these restrictions are unreasonable (and unconstitutional). In my opinion, the presumption should be that any adult is entitled to purchase, own, and carry a firearm with minimal burdens. The government should have to prove any exception that are made on an individual basis with full due process.
And they do. The best method of having both reasonable regulation and protections of rights are for the moderates and pro-rights groups to be politically active and aware enough to put a roadblock on the slippery slope, as it were.
No, Granny Clampett reference. 
Another, Non-Huffington, newslink, from a local source.
Preparing the next generation of ding dong ditchers for the next generation of Michael Bishops?
My understanding is that it is as illegal as shooting them with shot. Similarly, purpose-designed less-lethal shells like beanbag rounds are also as illegal as regular lead shot. The idea is that even less-lethal rounds can kill with luck or at sufficiently short range, so there’s no good sense in making them available and risking that people will presume “less-lethal” means “I should shoot at people on my property more often” or “I’m going to shoot my buddy in the ass to be funny”.
Who can’t read? 
The blind? Toddlers? Mentally retarded people? These people need to be armed?
Amazing how cheap straw must be these days.
I don’t see why an adult, otherwise of sound mind and a good citizen, should be denied a Constitutional right merely due to the fact s/he is illiterate.
Heck, many states will allow illiterate people to take a drivers test orally (one of the reasons road signs have highly distinctive shapes and colors, and rarely rely on words except for redundancy) and that’s not even a Constitutional right.
Believe it or not, there are in fact many adults in the United States who are illiterate or only semi-literate. This doesn’t mean that they are retarded or that they can’t understand concepts, just that they can’t decipher the written language. Some of them were never taught how to read, and others have problems like dyslexia. But it is entirely possible for someone to not know how to read/write and yet still be very capable in other areas of life.
If a person like that has a legitimate need for a firearm, whether it’s for self defense or protecting crops or other uses, they should be able to get it.
Yeah after I posted that I sat back and thought for a bit - there must be subsistence hunters, and others, out there who can’t read. I agree it doesn’t make them stupid or dangerous.
Nm
He saw the error of his ways.
Conversely, not passing those restrictions will undoubtedly eventually lead to every American citizen being given a fully automatic assault rifle and a supply of ammunition every July 4th.
I usually insist, when proposing that specific set of regulations, that the bans on fully automatic weapons be repealed as a quid-pro-quo (especially since a legally owned/registered machine gun has been used in crime exactly twice since 1938, if memory serves)
And a butter knife is a useful tool for eating buttered toast for breakfast. And an anti-shark cage is a useful tool for studying sharks up close. Obviously, those three applications, and the need to deploy those tools do not come up with the same frequency in the life of the average person.
Not the “same,” granted. But neglecting to point out that the relative frequencies of the needs are different (and to what degree they are different) comes pretty close (to the extent that doing so obscures the issue).
Okay, I understand the guy wanted to protect his lawn. Who doesn’t? I assumed that if the kid died he would have removed the body to prevent damage to a big patch of grass. Surely a rotting corpse would be bad for the short term at the least, lawn-care wise.
But, what does blood do to a lawn? Would the kid bleeding all over the lawn do more damage than the kid tromping over it? Or was this in fact a brilliant scheme for an especially lush lawn this season? Should I be thinking about wounding children rather than buying fertilizer?
That turns out to be a surprisingly difficult question.
Here’s the relevant law:
So the law seems to be saying that it’s illegal to enter a property unlawfully. Which isn’t real helpful.
But I also found this:
So assuming ringing a doorbell could be defined as criminal mischief, Bishop might have been justified in kicking Eberle off his property (although he’d have to argue he was preventing the act rather than just retaliating for it).
But shooting Eberle for ringing his doorbell is, not surprisingly, illegal. Eberle was not committing burglary, robbery, arson, a forcible felony, or trying to kick Bishop out of the house.
Presumably the “entering or remaining” part if trespass is because an owner might invite someone onto the property and then tell them to leave. So, he could have told the kid to get off the lawn, and then kicked him off, but apparently the ass was retreating too fast to be kicked. So, really, the shotgun was like a kind of leg stilt, to increase the range of the “kick”.
Wouldn’t landmines in the lawn or a claymore hooked up to the doorbell have been more effective?
Serious question for gun rights supporters: Do you admit that there are irresponsible gun owners, and if so, is it a concern of yours? How do you propose that issue is addressed?
I am not a gun owner*. I’m not anti-gun ownership at all. My problem is with the fringe group of people noted above. It comes down to a question of regulation of some sort vs. some level of danger to innocent people. What’s the compromise?
*Except for a pellet rifle I plink cans with in the backyard.
That too would be a crime in many jurisdictions… though not in Kentucky, I believe.
Of course there are irresponsible, and criminal, gun owners. Numbers don’t lie, and the number of gun deaths we have are entirely too high. It is always a concern of mine.
However, the “problem” is that in this country we (theoretically) have a belief that people are innocent until proven guilty. A person simply has to be trusted until he/she demonstrates that he/she cannot be trusted. The alternative is that we start arbitrarily denying rights to people we don’t trust before they ever have the opportunity to do something to convince us that this is so. That leads to a serious philosophical/legal issue: who do we trust?
This is not a road that we should go down, in my opinion. Arbitrary discrimination is bad. Do you really want to give Sheriff Cletus T. Redneck the right to decide who can or cannot exercise their rights based on their judgment? I hope not.
It’s an imperfect system, though. We have the instant check system, but even that is only a snapshot of what you have done to that point. There’s no guarantee that you won’t snap due to some incredible stress you’ll have to deal with in the future. The police do not have the ability to arrest you because you’re forgetful and you left your gun out. We simply cannot convict people of crimes they have not yet committed unless we let police kick in doors at random, and even then they can’t see into your mind.
All we can do is check people out when they buy the weapon, do our due diligence, and trust them to do the right thing.