| "What the people wish for" You imply the wish is for there to be no guns. The hard fact is that simply is not true. Americans have a wide range of opinion on the matter ranging from no guns, through various scenarios where there are guns and various ownership scenarios and regulations, and through to gun ownership being basically unfettered. Sidebar: The US currently is not a fully Democratic nation! It is a Republic and operates as a representative government. Direct democracy is not a part of US politcs on a national scale at this time. Some States do have direct democracy in the form of citizen initiatives that can get put on a ballot given sufficient public support is shown. Usually this involves gathering signatures and for that work to meet some metrics that represent meaningful public support. And States handle these in various ways too. Some States allow their elected legislature to overrule. Others do not. These initiatives can become law based on public support in the form of some type of majority vote in the States that permit them. In any case, on the National scale, representative government is the norm, and that means the citizens elect people who they believe will represent their opinions on policy well enough to live with. There is a growing movement toward more direct democracy, and allowing citizen initiatives on Presential election ballots is something many, and a growing number of Americans, believe would improve our politics considerably. I am an American who believes that form of direct democracy would be good for the nation and could perhaps check to some useful degree the currently toxic impact of money in politics we struggle with today. End Sidebar. My own take on guns, given the lack of consensus and the solid nature of the Second Amendment to the Constitution, is robust gun education made mandatory for everyone as part of their basic education on their way to adulthood. Our Supreme Court has affirmed gun ownership is an individual right, and like other individual rights, comes with some responsibility. Given the guns are just here, and given they won't just go away anytime soon, I suggest we make sure people are competent and well educated all around on guns. Said education would include use, repair, history, safety, and many other topics people could use to make more and better choices more of the time. There may be better ways to improve on all this and I am open to anything frankly. Just offering my own take here for the sake of discussion. Source: My own military service and training. There are no easy answers, just the human work long overdue. |
This violates the Second Amendment, as it would be a means for the government to infringe upon the right to keep and bear arms. As written, that right permits no qualifiers, limitations or responsibilities.
States could potentially make gun education mandatory for gun ownership, but of course many (including Texas) simply wouldn't.
Also, means testing has a bad history of being used to disenfranchise certain demographics, and I can easily see mandatory gun education being used to deny people of color access to firearms simply as a product of government only providing necessary educational resources to white majority areas.
You can have the Second Amendment, or effective gun legislation, but under the current definition of the former by the Supreme Court you can't have both.