Celeste,
So how would they have “properly identified and registered” the jerkoff before he did anything illegal? Are you suggesting the police do house-to-house searches to see if anyone has Nazi paraphernalia or anything else that’s considered dubious so they can then be “identified and registered”? Just what would that entail, putting an electronic tracker on him? How much suspicious stuff does someone have to own, after they’ve been subjected to these unreasonable searches and seizures, before they can be stripped of their constitutional rights, like the right to bear arms?
As for being “properly reared”, are you saying that we should outlaw bad child rearing so that we can also outlaw guns? Just how is such a law going to be passed? Who will decide what “rearing properly” consists of? Obviously, a significant percentage of Americans – like myself and the OP – will say that rearing properly means teaching your kids that they have the right, when they grow up, to own guns, whereas you will likely say that it means teaching your children that they have no right to arm and defend themselves. Many will think that rearing properly means telling their children that homosexuality is a sin, others that it’s fine for those who are born to it, and still others that it’s nifty to experiment with while you’re in college.
Just how are we going to ensure that everyone is “reared properly” enough that there won’t be anymore violent crime? Send the police, or social workers, regularly to every house with children in it to grill the parents over whether their strategies are the ones considered “proper” at that moment? What happens when fashionable thought changes and those in power decide that something entirely different is the “proper” way to rear children? And you do realize, don’t you, that there has never been a time in human history when everybody was “properly reared” enough that there was no violent crime? There is no reason to think such a thing is even possible.
As far as I can see, Celeste, all you’re suggesting is expanding the government even more, giving it even more power to interfere in our personal lives, on the basis of an unproven strategy, and on the assumption that *your* idea of “proper rearing” will be the one adopted. If the rest of your plan is adopted but they accept *my* idea of proper rearing instead, I don’t think you’re going to be very happy with the outcome, Celeste.
