"If someone's open carrying, I don't know as a mom whether that person has passed a background check, whether they have any training," said Turner. "Basically, I don't know if they're a good guy with a gun or a bad guy with a gun."
Angela Turner is a "gun owner and volunteer for Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America" according to the article. Austin Police chief Art "Oathbreaker" Acevedo also spouted some inanities, but let's just deal with Turner's for now.
sorry, Angela: you cannot know. neither can you know if that truck driver is about to swerve into a head-on collision with you, either due to some homicidal whim or just failure to change his bald front tires, of which the left is about to rupture. you don't know if that approaching jogger plans to throw you out into traffic or off the Golden Gate bridge.
what you can do is analyze the situation, check your options, determine the threat level if any, and act accordingly, all the time. your beloved universal background checks can only analyze past behavior, and are subject to all kinds of errors, particularly same-name conflation, which deprives rights of the innocent.
perhaps you'd be happy in a world where everyone is microchipped with a kill switch, so that a bureaucrat monitoring your thought patterns can see every little crazy thought that goes through your mind and shut you down if it looks like you might hurt someone. perhaps you'd trust Obama, or Acevedo, or the guy in the car behind you with that kind of power.
if so, please feel free to go land on a comet somewhere and get that world going. but leave this one alone. thanks.
last updated 2014-11-27 14:14:52. served from tektonic.jcomeau.com