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For the most part, in the years before the founding of the NHS, the medical system in Britain didn’t work; not in the sense that patients were not treated, but in the sense that the whole structure was financially unsustainable.This had been recognised for decades; as advances in medicine - especially hospital medicine - increased costs, so the historic charitable endowments of the ‘voluntary’ hospitals in each town were unable to support their expenditures. Right up to the end of the 19th century, admission to hospital had been largely confined to poor and working-class patients; anyone with any money would expect to be treated at home for all medical procedures - including major surgery. But advances in antiseptic practice, anaesthetics, radiography and therapeutic techniques (especially in the course of the First World War) meant that, for the first time, hospitals were admitting as inpatients, large numbers of persons from the professional, managerial and landed classes (and their families). Who in turn expected consistently higher levels of service and care delivery - increasing required staffing levels, and so costs. In effect, voluntary hospitals changed from being entirely charitable - applying accumulated historic endowments to treat the poor without charge - into non-profit businesses treating the general population, most of whom were capable of paying fees.These hospitals then established a new profession, the ‘hospital almoner’, whose job was to assess how much each patient might be able to contribute towards their treatment. Voluntary hospitals fitted out a proportion of their accommodation as ‘private beds’ for patients paying a regular fee; and also introduced ‘contributory schemes’ to spread payments. Every voluntary hospital also collected extensively in the streets; and solicited bequests from grateful patients and relatives; but none of this could keep pace with medical cost inflation. And as populations aged; so non-payng ‘charitable’ patient numbers also increased too.Alongside these voluntary hospitals for acute illnesss - each usually called ‘The Royal’; there were in most towns also municipal infirmaries funded from the rates - each commonly called ‘The General’. These had originally been the workhouse hospital departments of the former Poor Law Unions; and so lacked endowments, and had been provided to care for patients with chronic conditions; but under the Local Government Act of 1929 they could be taken over by their host local authority and redesignated to offer general and acute care. Under this legislation, these new general hospitals were required to recover treatment costs where possible, and accordingly changed to become more like the voluntary hospitals; imposing charges on better-off patients assessed through almoners, to supplement their annual budgets from the town hall, and sometimes also creating private wards of their own.But the recovered charges were never enough in total; so there were a whole succession of official reports and commissions on how to fix the system; with governments handing out ‘short-term’ finance to bridge the revenue gap until some sort of permanent solution could be devised. A wide variety of local schemes were implemented in the 1930s, looking to integrate voluntary and municipal hospitals under the overall supervision of of the local Medical Officer of Health, while collecting extra weekly per capita voluntary subscriptions from working-class populations to cover access to hospital; but none were found to be capable of full self-financing for the entire populations of all ages and conditions of employment, in the absence of some form of recurring central grant.Alongside these two hospital systems were General Practice doctors; most of whom maintained a ‘panel’ of patients entitled to access GP medical care under the terms of the National Insurance Act of 1911, which had established a compulsory National Insurance Fund, paid for from employee and employer contributions - although all drug costs were extra. About half of the adult population in 1936 - those with regular employment below the statutory threshold - were on a National Insurance GP panel; but older persons, non-employed wives, and children remained outside the National Insurance system; as did the self-employed and higher-paid, professional employees. General Practitioners therefore established their own supplementary panels, tailored with monthly subscriptions according to assessed ability to pay. Many GPs also worked in hospitals; as did a smaller number of consultant doctors holding medical specialisms. In principle, the doctor’s hospital treatment fee was separate from any assessed hospital payment - so paying patients faced two bills (or three, if continuing drug prescriptions were factored in).But then WWII came; and with it a long-planned wartime doubling of the acute hospital capacity of the country. Heavy civilian casualties were expected from bombing and gassing; and also from psychiatric trauma (which fortunately proved over-pessimistic). But war brought catastrophic injuries; and rapid advances in therapy to deal with them. All general and psychiatric hospitals were effectively nationalised within the wartime Emergency Medical Service. Using standardised designs in pre-fabricated wooden huts; most general hospitals were extended with extra wards. support services, and operating theatres.When the war finished, the old issues of finance would re-emerge; now doubled in scale and triple the cost. Neither the historic charitable endowments of the voluntary hospitals, nor the local rates, had been sufficient to support aggregate day-by-day hospital running costs before the war; now hospital budgets had trebelled, but the endowment income was no different. It was inevitable that the EMS would simply carry forward into peacetime as the NHS. A few hospitals withdrew to become wholly ‘private’ (maternity hospitals in particular); but for the bulk of long-stay, emergency and acute hospital care - including all municipal hospitals- there was no alternative to nationalisation.The tricky issue was General Practice. The British Medical Association fought a long battle to keep GPs from being incorporated into the new NHS; but were outmanouvered by Nye Bevan; who ensured that hospital specialists would receive relatively generous pay packages - plus the freedom to maintain elective private practice ‘on the side’. GP practices remained as private businesses, but their National Insurance panels were replaced by NHS registration (which simply carried forwards into peacetime, the wartime system of national registration that already existed). Even if GPs wanted to practice entirely privately, very few could make a living outside the NHS; as together, hospital-delivered specialist clinical services and General Practice registration by central capitation fees met almost the whole population demand for medical treatment - even for higher paid professional families who had formerly been excluded from state or municipal medical systems.Which is how the system in 1948 became established as ‘free at point of service’ for the whole population, rich and poor; and with no fees charged to anyone - either for treatments or for drugs. Facing a crisis in 1950, the second Attlee government met its financial shortfall by imposing co-payment prescription charges, and charges for dental and optical services (Bevan resigned); but the overall principle was maintained.We can compare this with the history of medical systems in the United States over the same period. Up to the 1890s, the two systems were broadly similar. US municipalites maintained workhouses and county hospitals; while there were a smaller number of large specialist endowed ‘voluntary’ hospitals in the big cities - mostly attached to prestigious medical schools. And just as in Britain, early 20th century advances in medical technology created a demand for greatly expanded access to hospital treatment for populations beyond the very poor. But in the US, there had also always been a considerable number of commercial ‘proprietary’ clinics and hospitals; who had no charitable endowments, but were financed entirely from patient fees paid to the doctors who ran and owned them.In the early decades of the 20th century, proprietary hospitals in the United States expanded rapidly, as outside the big cities, voluntary hospital provision was largely inaccessible. Moreover, as proprietary hospitals were not seeking to cross-subsidise charitable free treatments for the poor from paying patients, they could generally undercut voluntary hospital fees. At the same time, new hospital construction in the United States consisted entirely of ‘private’ wards with individual rooms - whereas in the UK open wards remained the predominant standard, even for newbuild. The United States lacked any system of compulsory public medical insurance, either to pay for doctors or for hospitals; proposals to include health coverage in the Social Security Act of 1935 having been dropped. In 1929 a consortium of Texas hospitals set up Blue Cross, and in 1939 a consortium of California doctors set up Blue Shield. But, without public mandate support, neither Blue Cross nor Blue Shield were able to establish a substantial market share; in 1940 about 9% of the adult population had health insurance.But in the United States - as in Britain - the key factor that wholly transformed the health system was state action and public funding in the second World War, resulting in a centrally driven rapid expansion of hospital provision, and consequently hospital budgets; which continued into peacetime and then needed to be paid for. Following the outbreak of War, the Federal government had introduced strong controls on wage inflation to prevent wartime enterprises bidding against one another for scarce resources of labour. Instead, however, war industries sought to attract workers with heavily cross-subsidised health insurance benefit packages, and from 1943, these were fully tax-deductable for both employers and employees. At the time, this looked like an easy win (wartime workers did not initially use hospitals that much more than before); but it had the long term effect of locking the entire working population into a very costly model of medical care administration and delivery, with spectacular administrative overheads in individual billing and insurance sales; and as these workers got older and their medical needs increased; so too did the consequent costs on the taxpayer. It was indeed already apparent to goverment economists by 1945 that these ad-hoc wartime health arrangements had the potential for unlimited upward cost pressures on public finance, and President Truman proposed to replace them with a standard-benefit national health care package for all citizens, but found himself opposed by the united lobbying of both the medical and insurance industries - as too by trades unions who reckoned to have negotiated more favourable health coverage for their memebers - and the proposal failed. By 1950, 50% of adult Americans were covered by publically-subsidised employer-contracted health insurance; and by 1960 this had increased to 66%. The US system is dressed-up as ‘employer/employee’ insurance funded; but this obscures the actuality that the bulk of this money is underwritten in large degree from the public purse.Lacking a centrally mandated universal health care system, the problems of escalating health spending expectations and demands in the United States fell primarily on employers (who had discretion to determine the scope of insurance policies to be offered to their employees); and on insurers (who had the discretion to negotiate favourable payment arrangements with selected hospitals and clinicians). By the late 20th century, the latter factor had transformed almost all health insurance operations for US populations into arrangements for ‘managed care’. Instead of insurers covering medical bills retrospectively as ‘fee-for-service’, only treatments within a pre-contracted clincical ‘network’ would be covered - generally with a range of coverage exclusions, and co-payments. This did effectively hold down the growth of insured payments - but only by reducing choice and shifting exceptional and excluded payments back onto the patients themselves. At the same time, employers looked for ways to reduce the growth in their health insurance premiums; which led increasingly to policies being offered to younger and healthier employees with lower premium costs, but with high levels of annual ‘deductible’ payments falling on the patient. Whereas co-payments (where the patient makes a standard contribution towards particular treatments) can be shown to hold down some unnecessary health expenditures; deductibles (where the patient is only re-imbursed when annual spend exceeds a standard sum) are notoriously liable to result in over-treatment and investigations of limited value - as the more the total spend, the greater is the proportion of annual cost passed on to the insurer. Anyone developing a medical condition associated with continued health care requirements was likely to lose out both ways; their choice of insurance policy would be constrained by exclusion clauses relating to pre-existing conditions; while annual premiums for policies without high deductibles became much more expensive.Which has now resulted in the paradoxical situtation that the entire publicly funded British National Health System receives lower per capita public funding than does the tax-funded element of the notionally ‘non-socialised’ US health system - once all Medicare, Medicaid, and tax subsidies are taken into account. So, each US resident has to pay eyewatering levels medical support costs through their taxes; and then find ever more exorbitant medical insurance, co-payment and deductible costs on top of that. In fact, far the most common international model of universal health provision is one financed by subsidised individual insurance contracts, with standard terms regulated through a national scheme; and most of these result in health system funding costs per capita not much greater than those of the British National Health system; and often achieving equal or better overall scores on standard health quality indicators. It appears that only the US system manages to combine exceptionally high public funding costs, with exceptionally poor health outcomes from treatment and care for the bulk of their populations with severe health needs. While apparently affording the average US health user far the worst options anywhere in individual treatment choice.So, even the the UK had not adopted a single-payer, tax funded, model of universal health coverage, it is highly unlikely that they would have found themselves facing the combination of runaway payment levels, poor quality outcomes, and grossly constrained individual choices, that now plague the populations of the United States. See U.S. Health Care from a Global Perspective, 2019: Higher Spending, Worse Outcomes?

Gun rights advocates think that cherry-picking “safety” stats to fit a narrative is neither effective nor productive. Has it occurred to gun control advocates that gun laws aren’t predictive of popular safety?Consider the nation of Mexico: where gun ownership has remained very stringently regulated for many years. In fact, as recently as last year there remained exactly one state-operated public gun store in all of Mexico (in Mexico City) … a formality intended to satisfy the constitutional right of access and ownership. This de facto gun ban in Mexico has not made for greater safety than observed in the US. Or consider Switzerland, where gun statutes allow possession of full auto weapons. Switzerland boasts ultra low interpersonal and personal levels of gun violence. There are more contrarian examples, but the point is that access or bans aren’t good predictors of “safety”.Even within the United States, consider the example of Minnesota. That state boasts very low incidents of gun related violence. Yet, Minnesotans enjoy far lass restrictive procurement and possession laws than the state of California. California has some of the most restrictive gun laws in the United States. Yet, gun related incidents of violence tallied in California are similar to population adjusted values observed in Texas, a state where gun laws are minimal. In fact, over the course of 25 years the net difference between gun-associated homicides in California and Texas is 6%; for perspective, consider that gun control advocates count gun deaths by police as a contributor to gun violence, and that in a recent report (CA DOJ 2015) fully 12% of gun-related homicides were related to law enforcement actions. [Accessible mental health care may have stronger correlation with reduced levels of gun violence].Gun control advocates have been selling an agenda. Perhaps, it is time for a paradigm shift … understand and develop solutions to address that defined by control advocates as violence (v.v. quadfecta aggregate of intentional, accidental, defensive law enforcement, and suicidal causes). For example, around 40% of pooled gun-related deaths in the US are from suicides (gun control advocates score suicides as part of the gun violence tally); the number of suicides doubles vehicular incidents are included. A benefit of greater accessibility to mental health care resources is certainly suggested as a course for control of drpression. Further, in instances of mass killings not involving a political agenda, the mental heath of the perpetrator is often a strong coincidental factor.Problem solving requires an understanding of causes. Guns are an instrument, not a cause. For that matter, motor vehicles could be considered an instrument of violence, and yet not a cause. Problem solving is most effective when applied in finding causative factors. Emotion can be a motivator to action, but it is hardly a rational analytical method in addressing causes. An example … a background check of buyers [prior to gun release] with mandatory gun registration [even between private parties] can identify unqualified purchasers from gun access; but, requiring technologically untenable imprint markings on firearms for new gun offerings serve no public good. Perhaps. Just perhaps … gun control advocates might want to step back from their agenda, ask what they are really trying to achieve, carry out conditional analytics, identify factors of causality rather than associations, and thereof promote effective solutions identified as causal factors.

Unlike most answers, I do think we have some “good gun laws”. The problem is twofold; those laws don’t (can’t) go far enough in scope, and they’re not enforced until after much more heinous crimes have occurred as a result. And not even then; the Parkland shooter violated the Gun Free School Zones Act, but he’s not being charged with that offense, because the 17 counts of premeditated murder he racked up in the next few minutes afterward are being treated quite rightly with much higher priority by prosecutors. You’re typically only charged with these kinds of malum prohibitum crimes when the investigators and prosecutors can’t find anything else to charge you with, which literally makes the law a way to turn people with no intention of committing a violent crime into felons anyway.On the other hand, the great majority of the laws we have, Federal and State, are either so anachronistic they no longer make sense, or are feel-good measures that never made any sense to begin with. Case in point, the aforementioned GFSZA; who in their right mind ever thought that a sign would have deterred the Stockton shooter? Or the Columbine shooters? Sandy Hook? Parkland? Santa Fe? They all walked right past one of these:And nothing happened until they started shooting.So, this list is gonna piss everybody off at some point or another, in that it will, in one single argument, call for more and less gun laws than our current status quo. You have been warned:Universalize and streamline background checks using updated technology. When NICS was conceptualized in the early 90s, the Internet as a public resource was still very young, and most people and businesses didn’t have access to it. 20-ish years later in 2015, 77% of Americans live in a home with broadband, 75% have a smartphone or other Internet enabled mobile device, and Internet access is a practical must-have for any retail businesses to run credit/debit cards, so even if you happen to not have Internet access, your local gun store will.As such, there’s really very little reason for NICS to still be a call center, at least not one of its current size. We can do the same job with a secure web application handling the overwhelming majority of the traffic. That would additionally allow that app to be accessible to people besides FFLs, and would be the most convenient option available for universalizing background checks.That also creates other possibilities, such as streamlining the 4473. This is actually a virtual necessity if you’re going to universalize background checks without requiring an FFL to run the check; the information on a 4473 is identity theft on a silver platter, and you’re going to be expecting the average Joe to not only not misuse that data, but to safeguard it for however long you want the provenance chain to be traceable. The REAL ID Act gives us some possibilities for uniquely verifying identity without traditional identifying information; name, address and “document discriminator” aka audit number off of an RIA-compliant ID would be enough to get any other information needed as of time of sale, and when actually running the background check, all you’d actually need to input is the DD code and state of issue and the app could retrieve anything else needed.The questionnaire is little more than a trap, and we can get rid of it; the idea is that if you are a prohibited person and filled the questionnaire out such that the FFL actually bothered to call it in, and NICS denied you, you have just made a materially false statement on a Federal government form. However, the Brady Act itself makes trying to buy a firearm while knowingly prohibited a crime in itself, so either way the Feds have to prove the offence was committed knowledgeably. All we really need to give background checks “teeth” is a very obvious “click-wrap” disclosure in the app that states unambiguously that if you fall into one of the listed prohibited categories and submit the form, you are committing a crime. We can capture a signature image if you really want, but no handwriting analyst will ever swear on oath that your signature drawn on a tablet with a stylus would match a signature sample written on paper.Once the check comes back clean, you have to give the seller the ability to prove beyond any doubt that he ran the check. Since centralization of records of gun sales is an extremely touchy issue, not to mention illegal under the 1986 FOPA, the proof has to be self-contained in the paper record of sale. You can do that by encoding a “digital signature” on the paper document, such as in a QR code (it’d be a large one, but the spec allows for up to 4K of data to be encoded in one QR which would be enough). NICS basically receives all the information on the form, makes sure the background check on the listed individual passed, then strings it together in a known order, hashes it with a secure hash function, then encrypts that hash using an “asymmetric key” algorithm like RSA or ECC. You don’t have to know the technical details, just that this “hash and encrypt” signature system is the backbone of secure communications on the Internet that most major websites now use for all their traffic, and it’s worked for a couple decades now, failing only when the human side of information security does.So, to prove you ran the background check, you produce a copy of the record of sale, the QR code can be scanned into a mobile version of the NICS app along with the plain text data of the form, and the plain text data is hashed the same way as the signature originally was. Then, the app decrypts the signature with the public key of the keypair that initially encrypted it, and if the hashes match, whoever’s asking knows the record is authentic, and the guy on the form is the next guy they need to talk to about why that gun ended up at a crime scene. They know it’s authentic because only the information on that form, encrypted using a key known only within the NICS system as of the date of sale (they have a lifespan; NICS could generate a new keypair every couple years, and the app would know all public keys and the date range each one was valid for), could have produced the digital signature in the QR code, which means NICS vetted the exact data on the printed form. If you don’t have a record of sale or other proof of dispossession (i.e. police record of theft, loss or destruction) and your gun shows up at a crime scene, you’re now a POI and guilty of a crime in itself (failure to maintain required records).A system like this would allow UBCs to be performed by anyone with a laptop or smartphone, and it would even allow buyers to avoid the three-day delay on an in-person private meetup by vetting themselves and obtaining a “pre-authorization”. And it would do so without requiring an FFL (though you could still use one and they’d become the custodian of the record of sale), and without centralizing these records in government hands (a de facto registry of gun owners).Increase the Federal minimum age to purchase semi-automatic long guns to 21, alongside the minimum for handguns. Psychologists are pretty clear that puberty, and the host of chemical, physical and mental changes that occur during it, really doesn’t wind down until the mid-20s for the average man; maybe a year or two earlier for women. Auto insurance companies know this; you can be totally accident free your entire driving career since the age of 16, and they don’t consider you “low-risk” until you’re 25. On that note, we as society grant the rights and privileges (and responsibilities) associated with adulthood to young adults gradually; most religions have an informal age of majority (such as the Age of Reason in Christianity, around 12 or 13), then from a more legal standpoint you can drive at 16, you’re criminally and civilly liable for your actions at 17 (though this varies by state), you can vote and own most guns at 18, and drink at 21. So, the “eighteen means eighteen” argument that when you’re legally an adult, you’re a full adult, just doesn’t fly. Any SDI in boot camp will tell you their 18-year-olds are just as immature as any other, the main difference is that along with their service rifle (and long before they touch one), they get a no-nonsense introduction to following orders as given without argument or discussion, designed to condition them to do exactly that when lives are on the line.So no, I do not think that an 18 year old, simply by virtue of managing to not piss off their parents or teachers long enough to attain said age, should be able to walk up to the firearms counter of a sporting goods store and buy absolutely anything under the glass or on the back wall. There’s legal adulthood and there’s physical adulthood, and the medical consensus is that those are currently separated by about 8 years. At least give them the three extra that we already do for alcohol and handguns, for them to realize that life actually does get better in many ways after high school, before we allow them to purchase a rifle that can end a life for each wiggle of their pointer finger with no other action required. At 18, you can buy and own break-action and repeating-action long guns; for semi-automatics and revolvers, it should be 21.Temporary firearm restraining orders. Oh yeah, we’re going here too. “Red Flag laws” have been the subject of serious debate in the U.S., with arguments against ranging from “the police can already do this if there’s a credible threat to someone’s safety” to “this is just an end run around the rights of the accused allowing vindictive individuals to use the government to indefinitely suspend a person’s RKBA without the burden of proof required for a criminal conviction“.Personally, I think it’s a good idea that needs very careful attention paid to its implementation. Whether or not society needs an actual law detailing a new process, we shouldn’t have to wait for a potential, specific threat to public safety to become an actual specific threat to public safety before action can be taken. At the same time, I recognize the very serious potential for evil, and it simply cannot be dismissed. Protective orders don’t require a unanimous jury verdict based on there being no reasonable doubt that one is needed. All the petitioner needs is to convince a judge it’s a good idea, and judges run the gamut on the topic, with most of the ones in New Jersey chomping at the bit to sign anything that comes across their desk that takes a gun away from a civilian.So, if we’re gonna use court orders to remove guns from a person who has not been convicted of any crime, we need to strike a very fine and specific balance between the law being too easily abused for government or personal gain, and the law being just as ineffective as waiting for a crime to be committed. There must be controls in place regarding who can “wave the red flag”, what criteria is valued in determining to grant the initial order, and a guaranteed maximum time for hearing the subject’s challenge to said order. In addition, a common criticism of the laws is that is that the restraining orders target the guns based on a need for mental health care, but don’t provide mental health care. If we’re really worried about someone’s mental state, that sounds like the obvious place to start. We can talk about these orders as an exception to being “involuntarily committed to a mental health institution”; if the care was the result of a temporary restraining order it doesn’t trigger the permanent Federal prohibition, provided the care has some measure of success (or doesn’t find a problem).I’ve also floated the idea of a “yellow flag”, an indication that someone is in need of a refresher on firearms safety due to demonstrated complacency or ignorance of basic safety rules, but is unwilling to get the training themselves. A court order to force the training based on a description of the unsafe behavior, in lieu of any possible criminal charges for said behavior, might have a significant effect on reducing negligent discharges and unintended access by children while protecting gun owners from rabid prosecution for first-time offenses. Similar safeguards would be needed to avoid this being used as a nuisance or a backdoor to indefinite loss of gun rights with no criminal conviction.Now, having agreed in a very big way to a few major recent demands of the myriad gun control groups, I must in all seriousness ask, what do gun owners get in return for being limited to single-shots and repeating-actions for three years, having to defend against repeated aspersions on our mental health from a vindictive ex-spouse or your in-laws, plus being required to Federally vet anyone they pass a gun to, and then maintain proof of that check for years or even indefinitely?While I think the conclusion of the “cake analogy” - “I want my whole damn cake back now” - is unhelpful and even counterproductive, the position is sound; gun owners have been agreeing to allow their right to keep and bear arms to be restricted in the name of public safety for over 80 years, and all that’s happened is that those who are against gun ownership in the first place come back wanting more restrictions.This is in fact the stated goal of gun control activists like Josh Sugarmann; to restrict, piece by piece, the RKBA in the U.S., like boiling a frog, until the 2A is effectively dead because those still willing to jump through the regulatory hoops are a superminority, and/or because the only weapons still available for civilian purchase have little practical use for self-defense (which is what 60% of gun owners give as a major reason they are gun owners, compared to just 36% for hunting). They get impatient from time to time and make big pushes, but after most of the major players favoring gun control “outed” themselves as to their end goal in the early 90s, resulting in the Republican Party’s first bicameral Congressional majority in 40 years, most have walked back their public positions. Can those new stated end goals for gun control be trusted? Only the GCAs really know for sure, but history is not on their side.So, if we’re going to call UBCs and an increased minimum age a “compromise”, it should fit the definition; both sides should leave the table angry with the agreement they reached. To that end, gun control advocates do not get it all their own way; policies proven to be counterproductive or ineffective since their passage need to be rolled back, along with additional measures that become possible once it’s that much more obvious that the guys who legally own guns are not the problem in our country:Repeal the Federal Gun-Free School Zones Act, and all government-level policies restricting the possession of guns on any publicly-owned or managed land or building where entry is not contingent on passing through an armed security checkpoint where all entrants are searched for weapons. If the government and/or property owner is serious about people not having guns in a particular place, you know it before you get five feet inside. We have the technology and the process. The question is whether it’s worthwhile to implement these in any given place. If it’s not, hanging up a sign forcing those breaking no other law to disarm not only doesn’t solve the problem, it makes it worse.I will, in this discussion, give private property owners the benefit of the doubt; its your property, you’re a legal entity just like I am, it’s your prerogative to restrict entry as you wish based on any fact not explicitly protected under Federal law. I personally like to at least know someone else in my home besides me has a gun, and I won’t begrudge you the same. But had you caught me on any other day I’d be insisting on landowner liability for owners/controllers of “places of public accomodation” posted as “no guns allowed” for victims of violent crime in such venues. You are imposing a restriction on my entry into your otherwise publicly-accessible place, which places me and everyone else there at any give time at greater risk of harm, and you take no additional steps to mitigate that risk; that makes your policy a contributing factor to any criminal violence I might become a victim of while on your property.Repeal the Hughes Amendment, and allow purchase and registration of new automatic firearms in the United States. Yeah, you heard me right. The NFA, in itself, was sufficient to virtually end the violence committed with legally-owned automatic weapons; it gave the precursor organizations to the BATFE and FBI the legal tools they needed to dismantle the Mafia gangs of the 1920s, and since it passed, not one violent crime was committed with a legally-owned, NFA-registered machine gun. The only two crimes committed with any legally-owned machine gun involved police-issue machine pistols, and the crimes that actually prompted the Hughes Amendment, mainly in the Miami area among rival drug gangs, were committed with illegal weapons smuggled into the country alongside the drugs. The most notable shootout involving automatic weapons since the passage of the NFA, the North Hollywood Shootout, happened 10 years after the passage of the Hughes Amendment, and involved illegally-modified AKMs that would have landed the robbers in prison for 20 years each even without the Hughes Amendment in effect.Once again, the law is only a restriction on those inclined to follow it in the first place. The Hughes Amendment was passed in response to a spate of crimes in Miami, representing less than 3% of the total homicide count in Miami-Dade County, committed with weapons the ATF didn’t even know about in the first place. The ability of people to legally buy machine guns didn’t figure into it in the slightest. The Hughes Amendment also gave us the current political climate regarding guns and any registration thereof; in 1986, the Feds proved that they were willing to use registration as a first step to an outright ban. It had been done at lower levels before (DC’s handgun ban dated to 1976 and was legislated a similar way; you had to register all firearms to possess them in DC, and beginning in 1976 you couldn’t register handguns unless they were already there), but the Hughes Amendment brought the tactic to national attention, poisoning any attempt at actual compromise ever since. If gun control advocates want gun rights advocates to ever sit down at a negotiating table and assume good faith ever again, this strategy needs to be demonstrably off the table as a gun control tactic.Deregulate suppressors and short-barreled firearms. The NFA was passed 80 years ago, and was originally intended to restrict access to “concealable” firearms by union labor protesters, while not being an insurmountable hurdle to the labor bosses putting down the strikes, nor the police who are specifically exempted by the law and for whom the factory or mine was the primary taxpayer in the locale. In the works for most of the Roaring 20s, the NFA finally passed early in FDR’s term, due to a combination of the increasing publicity of mafia violence in the media involving fully-automatic weapons, and an attempted assassination of then-President-elect Roosevelt making gun control an early personal priority of FDR’s.That was 84 years ago. In more recent times, we wear less clothing in general, making these same types of weapons harder to conceal, meanwhile even illegal use of weapons and devices subject to NFA restrictions (registered or otherwise) is very low. Hunters and homeowners want to use suppressors to save their hearing and reduce the disturbance inherent in a rifle shot to those nearby, and for proof they’re not dangerous in themselves, one only has to look at the UK, where they’re sold off the shelf in any sporting goods store, and hunters are encouraged by police to use one. Homeowners also want access to short-barreled rifles as home defense weapons, easier to aim than a handgun while easier to maneuver through a home than a 16″ barreled rifle. For both SBRs and SBSes, workarounds to the law have been found and vetted by the ATF, and have become very popular, making the additional NFA restriction of short-barreled weapons useless in practice.National carry permit reciprocity, and a Federal pre-emption of “may-issue” permitting policies among State governments. Totally within the Feds’ purview under provisions of the Full Faith and Credit Clause (giving Congress the power to legislate the manner in which legal instruments of one state are to be recognized and honored by any other), Federally-enforced national reciprocity would force all 50 states, D.C. and all Federal territories to recognize a valid concealed-carry permit issued by any state - or the government-issued resident ID card of any state that does not require a permit - as if it were a valid concealed carry permit in their jurisdiction, subject to the laws of the state in which the person is currently located. So if it’s illegal to enter a bar in Texas with a concealed weapon (and it is, a felony in fact), it’s just as illegal to do so with a Tennessee permit as a Texas one. But, if it’s legal to walk around Central Park while strapped if you have an NYC carry permit, it’s just as legal to do it with a Texas permit, or a Tennessee permit, or a driver’s license from the State of Vermont.Now, national reciprocity, especially when it includes nonresident licenses, will accomplish an effective end to “may-issue” policies anyway, but I wanted to be explicit about this. The majority of the states in this country recognize a right to carry, typically subject to state regulation on the manner of the wearing of arms. As of 2018, the remaining few states that exercise subjective discretion in permitting, typically along the lines of requiring “good cause”, do so for the sole and express reason of limiting permits to a privileged few. It’s codified in Maryland’s version of the good cause requirement; applicants must have a reason to carry that “distinguishes the applicant from the general gun-owning public”; a desire to defend oneself is not distinguishing, as 60% of gun owners have their guns for that reason.This is unconstitutional, and to date the only credible reason SCOTUS has not heard a case on this topic is that the Court, and Roberts as Chief Justice, is unwilling to be seen as a tool to overturn state gun laws in a series of lock-step ideologically-polarized 5–4 decisions. They want the existing decisions in Heller and McDonald to be digested and mixed into lower court case law, and once that settles to a backwash of a few notable disagreements among Circuit Courts and State Supreme Courts, they’ll entertain the question. It’s well-known in legal circles that Gorsuch and Thomas are already chomping at the bit for another 2A case, but as of when Peruta was denied cert in 2016, the popular theory was that Alito and Roberts were unsure of Kennedy’s vote (on top of the whole “tool to overturn state laws 5–4” thing), and so took the out that with Moore v. Madigan not having been appealed by Illinois, there was no active Circuit Court split pending SCOTUS review.That’s compromise. I give you, you give me. Gun owners began the 20th Century with zero Federal restrictions on gun purchase or ownership, and many fewer State restrictions than most of the more problematic states for gun owners currently impose. The original position of this debate is that Americans have free and easy access to whatever firearms were available, and therefore “keeping some of my gun rights for now” is not a “compromise position”. That’s like me telling you “give me all the money you have now and all your future earnings”, you refusing, and then me saying “let’s compromise; you give me half of your money and 75% of your future earnings”.Would you agree to that “deal”? Yeah, didn’t think so.