First, a few questions for the pro-gun crowd:
(1) At what point would you draw the cutoff line between things people should be allowed to own and things they shouldn’t? Or would you draw no line? Does anyone here think that average citizens should be able to own, say, nuclear weapons? (And I ask that not as a strawman, because as long as you don’t support private ownership of nukes, there does have to be a cutoff point somewhere. Where? And what’s philosophically or legally or practically different about weapons on one side of it vs. weapons on the other side of it?)
(2) What’s your opinion about laws that would affect weapon ownership without ever disallownig it, in particular, registration laws, trigger lock laws, gun-safety-class-laws, background checks, waiting periods, restrictions on what can be sold at gun shows, etc.?
And a few general comments:
(1) I’m far from being a constitutional scholar, but the way I read the 2nd amendment, the first clause is basically irrelevant. If there was an amendment that read "Thomas Jefferson being a big booger head, it shall be illegal to name boys ‘Thomas’ ", the effect would be making naming boys ‘Thomas’ illegal. What the motivations were (TJ being a boogerhead) are irrelevant, and are merely commentary.
(2) What bothers me about the pro-gun side of this debate is that I feel they are so entrenched in their positions that they reflexively strike out at any and all anti-gun measures, without really feeling a need to justify that particular response. Now, I agree that the AWB ban seems pretty stupid, from all I’ve heard. But I think that (for instance) a waiting-period law is totally reasonable. But the response to it doesn’t seem to be so much “well, here are 5 logical reasons why a waiting-period law would be a bad idea” (and I can well believe that such logical reasons might exist). Rather, the response is “Slippery slope! Cold dead hands! People kill people! Why do you hate the constitution???”
(3) While we’re here, here’s my view of the topic as a whole: I think that people should be basically allowed to own almost anything up to things that are nearly WMDs. But I think that more and more potentially destructive things should require more and more regulation, safety equipment, etc. If you really want to own an M-16 for fun, for your collection, or for home defense, I have no problem with that. But as an M-16 is potentially FAR more destructive than a bread knife, I see no problem with licensing, registration, safety training, waiting periods, background checks, and so forth.
Oh, and one quick specific response:
First of all, no, you almost certainly can NOT do more damage with a compuer than you can with a gun, unless you have an incredibly specialized set of skills. If I had an M-16 and minimal knowledge of how to use it, I could be the next beltway sniper, kill a dozen people or so, cause massive panic, and cost millions of dollars in law enforcement costs. If I have a computer and minimal knowledge of how to use it, I can fill it extremely full of spyware and destry my credit rating.
It’s hard to think of many things other than guns that so drastically increase the potential body count that someone could achieve without much effort. (One other thing that definitely qualifies is a car… in fact, I’m a bit surprised that we’ve so rarely seen insane or evil people go on a running-into-people rampage in a vehicle. But cars CLEARLY serve a necessary social function, and are heavily regulated in a number of different ways.)
If there were a device that could be purchased which had some legitimate uses but which also, if misused in a simple fashion, would wipe out the hard drives of all computers within a 2 mile radius, I would have no problem whatsoever with restricting the sale and ownership of that device.