It is legal to make your own gun. You just can't make them for sale.

...uh, while his "was" the voice, Frank passed ages ago. they need to publish an updated list!lol

La Pierre is a halfwit made dangerous by his money and bribery driven access to the most corrupt corrners and crannies of official Washington. His organization must be reined in and defanged.

The “Free Enterprise” avenue to effective gun control

If it's all about profit, as an earlier reply stated, let's maximize profit - for someone!

Supporters of the “Free Enterprise System” insist that it is self-regulating and should be applied wherever possible. Why not put this system to work on gun control too?

We have to have a license and liability insurance to drive/own a car or a motorbike that can cause "grievous injury or death" when abused or mishandled or merely because of bad luck! Guns certainly fit in that category.

A logical and reasonable requirement would be that anyone possessing a gun must be licensed, and have "appropriate" liability insurance and, of course, that a firearm cannot be purchased without proof of insurance, as is the case with a car.

Insurance companies will see an enormous opportunity for new income streams and will insist on MAJOR background checks and other conditions before issuing gun insurance. Do you think they would issue insurance to violent felons or the mentally ill? Surely, no one can object to a new and significant opportunity for profit under the “Free Enterprise System”?

Carry a gun without insurance and it will be confiscated until insurance is obtained. When someone is stopped while driving without insurance, is their car not impounded until proof of insurance is provided?

This is not interfering with your "right to bear arms", just requiring reasonable insurance to protect/or compensate those who might be injured or killed by your negligence or criminal activity.

It will have the additional positive impact on our economy of increasing the costs of gun ownership – you’d need a “rider” for each additional gun to ensure that you keep it in your possession and under control. This could substantially increase our national GDP!

Perhaps ammunition and larger magazines should be insured as well? More lethal ammunition purchase requires higher insurance coverage?

The Newtown Massacre families likely have no access to any compensation for the deaths of their loved ones. If the killer’s mother had been required to carry insurance on each of her firearms, she would likely 1) have had fewer firearms and 2) not had an “assault weapon” which would logically require higher insurance premiums and 3) to avoid even higher premiums she would have had to demonstrate her firearms were not available to her “troubled” son.

The “Free Enterprise System” as practiced by insurance companies choosing to insure firearms will create a much more “regulated” right to bear arms as is specified in the sacred Second Amendment! Who can object to that?

If your response to this proposal is that guns are too dangerous to be required to be insured – what are you then saying?????

Insurance = Safety!?!? Huh???

So now that you have made "owning" a gun less affordable there will be less gun crimes/violence...Really???
I guess you think that "rich people" are all sane, rational and responsable people who always abide by the law...No?

Hmmm weren't the shooters at Columbine all from financially well-to-do families???

I think your idea is for the Insurance salesmen!

Only the wealthy nuts will have all the guns and the less fortunate will not even have a chance to protect themselves...not even against criminals that break into our homes. When the wealthy are the only ones with the guns they have much less to fear from the non-wealthy. You say you're gonna have a revolution? Not with clubs and knives against high tech weapons! And the wealthy, and their puppet politicians, know it! The wealthy can continue to keep laughing at us knowing that we have no other choice but to submit to their injustices. It just keeps getting easier and easier for them to abuse us all. Even if we never had a revolution...just being so very well armed and making it possible for one, would be enough to make our abusers back off.

Well spoken, Bob. IF the shareholders could get over their profits and put pressure on Lapee-air then maybe the NRA could find its way back to supporting Americans vs. fear baiting and delusionary nonsense of LaPee-Air.

Speaking of the NRA's descent into madness, most likely GUNMAN Jimmy Lee Dykes was a card carrying VIP member. His obsession with guns, besides patrolling his yard and willing to shoot trespassers, included a 1995 arrest for improper exhibition of a weapon. In all fairness though, given his anti Govt., survivalist insanity, I'd say Beck and Limpbaugh pushed him into his break with reality, just like they do to millions of others everyday.

Maybe, we just raised our pension age to 67 here in Canada. But they did give us a lot of time to adjust. It just seems with the unemployment rate the same as it was four years ago as it is today and your roads and bridges falling apart, 6 trillion more in the hole I would be trying to Deflect the attention somewhere else To if I screwed up that bad.

Hey KEND!
Post # 27 on Friday Feb. 1st is for you...Been waiting...Can't wait to hear what you have to say.

Mgreenmanoh, I think yours and Thom Hartmann's brain fart of an idea for gun control just got shot down by common sense arguments by Nachos and Palidometry. I hope like kend that the government would just shut up on trying to find ways to control, monitor, and register and create data banks on every thing that moves. Stop finding ways to take away our bill of rights and think more about preserving and protecting our freedoms. It is the economy that needs the focus, aren't we all a little tired of this "can't let a good crisis go to waste without pushing a more control agenda into place" crap management style.

Yeah! Good point Dowdotica. Frank Zappa died of prostate cancer about a decade ago if I'm not mistaken. They must really mean business if there putting dead folk on that list. Someone screwed up royally. Or, maybe, their mad at one of the "Mother's of Invention?"

These words are from Palindromedary not me. I just happen to agree with every one of them and thought they deserved repeating here:

"Maybe people's 'right' to transportation should be contained within mass transportation instead of the dangerous weapons (cars) that kill more people than guns ever did. I'm sure some people would go for this.

The problem with limiting guns to militias is that militias are small groups that can be more easily identified and watched and wiped out by smaller military or police forces than it would be if guns were owned by everyone. They are also politicized and usually have a rather dictatorial belief system, often of a religious bent. And unless you hold the same beliefs you are not welcome. And once one becomes a member of these organizations it would be hard to distance one from any radical decisions some 'leader' makes on behalf of the members. There is often a kind of herd mentality that can get you killed. Any time you 'join' an organization...say like Jim Jones People's Temple...you can expect to 'drink the cool-aid' one day. No, the People's Temple was not a militia but they did have many weapons, men who would use them, and suicide juice.

The uprisings in Libya, Egypt, and elsewhere..including the Occupy Wall Street groups that did not have 'leaders' that the authorities could identify, arrest, and/or control worked much better than a specific group that could be watched, actions anticipated, and controlled. But it is the very 'fear of a well armed people' (and they don't even have to conduct an armed rebellion...just the fear that it could happen if things got so bad) that would influence how our politicians conduct themselves.

Right now, they are using all the propaganda scare tactics...like a "billion rounds of hollow point bullets being distributed to government agencies"...and trying to build up their ability to spy on every citizen. As the wealthy 1%, and their capos, continue to squeeze every last bit of humanity out of everyone else they realize that one day the dam will break and well armed people could revolt against the tyrannous system.

We are starting to see the effects of the tyranny now...increased 'crime' rates...people going nuts...shootings....suicides. It'll get worse! And what will people do to protect themselves... huddle in a corner... under the bed... while the police finally show up and call in the coroner?

Sure, right now it is the military style weapons the authorities are going after but it won't stop there. Remember, guns don't kill people...people kill people. And if they don't have guns, they'll use knives or clubs or other methods to do mass murders. It has happened in China and other countries all by using clubs or knives...killing many school children and teachers. The genocide that killed almost a million people in Rwanda was mostly all done by clubs and knives."

Palindromedary and the NRA are right! We need to reinstate public funding of Mental Institutions to deal with this problem. Anything else is a wasted effort and a frontal assault on a free society.

My comment, ALICE, was more for a laugh, even though it is true. I wasn't looking for you to appologize, or feel the need to explain yourself.
However, since you keep mentioning that you "voted for the lesser of two evils", I will say this; Obama isn't/wasn't the lesser of two evils...The devil himself would have been a better choice. When you compare Mitt and Obama on the issues - both foreign and domestic - their agenda was the same.
What's worse is that we already had 4 years of Obamney...He proved himself not worthy of being a great leader Of, For, and By the People.
Had all those who caste a fear vote for Obama, and alll those who caste a fear vote for Mitt, voted for what they truely value we may have been able to elect Jill Stien, maybe even Rocky Anderson.

~cont~

It was once brought to my attention that the civilian casualties in Iraq alone number enough people to fill the Oakland Coliseum 12 times over. That's 12 Coliseums full of innocent victims screaming their heads off stacked one on top of each other, towering into the sky. The sound of 1 sold out Coliseum with happy fans during a Raider's Football game on Sunday is deafening. The sound of 12 such Coliseums stacked one on top of the other with dead Iraq civilian family's screaming for justice should be a sound we all can imagine in our minds.

As horrible of a notion as that is, conjuring such an entity in our minds might help us make the necessary actions to curtail the Military Monster in our midst. Compared to it's carnage, these lone nut shootings are mosquito bites on the back side of a horse.

MMmmNACHOS says "Obama isn't/wasn't the lesser of two evils... When you compare Mitt and Obama on the issues - both foreign and domestic - their agenda was the same." And I respectfully - but vehemently - disagree.

For the past several years I have been an intermittant subscriber to The Nation, one of the greatest magazines published in this part of the world. It's been in circulation for well over a century, and Its pages contain some of the most intelligent political analysis I have ever read. The October 22, 2012 issue has, on its cover, the rhetorical question: "Why Obama?" and I'll quote what follows: "If he loses this election, we can expect a ruthless effort to dismantle the social contract and decimate sources of resistance." Flip past the cover and the first article's title reads like a command: "Re-Elect the President". It starts out by openly acknowledging progressives' discontent with our president and his policies as valid and justified. "But", it goes on, "that discussion should not obscure what is at stake in this election. A victory for Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan in November would validate the reactionary extremists who have captured the Republican Party. It would represent the triumph of social Darwinism, the religious right, corporate power and the big money donors who thrive in a new Guilded Age of inequality. It would strike a devastating blow to progressive values and movements, locking us in rear-guard actions on a range of issues-- from the rights of women, minorities, immigrants and LGBT people to the preservation of social insurance programs and a progressive tax structure. Inside the Democratic Party, Obama's defeat would embolden the Blue Dogs and New Dems, who have greased the party's slide to the right. Whatever disappointments we have with Obama's first term- and there are many- progressives have a profound interest in the popular rejection of the Romney/Ryan ticket."

Whatever your issues with Obama (which I am likely to share), lumping him with Romney as if they were one & the same constitutes a grave error of judgment. They are NOT the same. To insist that they are is simplistic, black & white thinking (no pun intended). It is allowing anger and discontent to cloud your better judgment. It is also intellectually lazy, in my opinion.

Do I think Obama will go down in history as one of our great presidents? Absolutely not. That same article I just quoted part of went on to say: "...we have no illusions about the audacity of hope, no faith that the re-election of President Obama alone will accomplish the radical change this magazine has championed." It outlines the work we as progressives still have to do and names Congressional candidates to elect and re-elect. It also reminds us that sliding back into complacency after the election is not an option if we want real progressive change in this country.

I would have much preferred Jill Stein or Rocky Anderson over Barak Obama. But neither of them had a prayer of a chance of beating back those ugly fascists, Romney & Ryan. We can blame our corporatized media for sidelining and marginalizing the best candidates by excluding them from the televised debates. This highlights the issue of media consolidation, one of the greatest threats to our democracy. Never underestimate the power of the media! Excluding third-party candidates from those debates practically guarantees their defeat in any election. That, my friend, is the reality of the situation, and like the old saying goes: "Denial is not a river in Egypt." - Aliceinwonderland

Alice, Alice, Alice....You misunderstand what I mean...Neither Obama or Romney can equate to a lesser evil. Both are Corporate Puppets and serve Wall St. True Romney would have served the right...but Obamney isn't really doing the opposite, and is a foul leader with innocent blood on his hands. That you voted for Obama says you are okay with that, and you can scream different but that's the bottom line truth...You voted for a Corporate Murderous Puppet!

You say that Stein and Anderson would never stand a chance...it's that kind of irrational thinking that lends to fear votes. More important than just winning is sending a loud message to Washington. Originally I was going to vote for Ron Paul, but then I realized he - all-though-be-it he changed the conversation regarding war, terrorism, and foreign policy - he would still be an economic puppet obediently serving Wall St.

And to further my oppinion...I wasn't worried as to weither Mitt or Barrack became president...Again because they both serve Wall St.

I'm gratified to see at least five organizations on there of which I'm a current or former member. Disappointing not to see my American Library Association. I'll bet the liveliest commentary about the whole thing is people who made the list congratulating each other!