Renner is a hypocrite.

While I can understand the argument for not wanting to register guns, it's not enough for me to come out against it. Background checks don't work without registration. I could sell my unregistered pistol to a lunatic and no one would know. If it was registered, then I'd have to tell the authorities what happened to it and the lunatic wouldn't get the gun.

While I realize registration could be used to try to collect firearms at some later date, I find it difficult to believe that would actually happen. People would resist, a lot of them, very violently. Even the armed forces would have a tough time collecting all our weapons (and they wouldn't do it). Germans are a lot more law-abiding than we are and I'm not sure gun ownership was as widespread in 1930s Germany as it is in the US today.

I was just using the 5-yr-old as a real-world example of the mentality of some people in this country. They truly are nuts.

The nazi gun control meme is quite popular, but it is a case of putting the horse before the cart. It ignores all the other societies with strict gun control that did not devolve into fascism. In fact, it even ignores the government that preceded Hitler's rise to power - the Wiemar Republic.

The Wiemar Republic had even stricter gun control - all private ownership was banned and confiscations were relatively common. In fact, the law that Hitler put in place was a relaxation of the gun control policy at the time - it went from an outright banning of pirvate ownership to a registration system.

The rise of nazism in germany did not turn on gun registration - not even close, it turned on the public's willingness to embrace fascism. When the majority is against you, no amount of guns can make a difference. The US has proved that in practically every conflict since WWII - vietnam, korea, iraq, afghanistan. With massive superiority in firepower like 1000:1 but not enough popular support, the US still couldn't win. If it ever comes down to a civil war within the US, it will be the same result - if the majority of the population does not support the revolutionaries, they will lose.

As for my own objections - I dislike background checks because background checks require databases - and every time a background check fails to prevent a high profile shooting, there will be a push to put more and more information into the system to make the checks more comprehensive. I believe that massive tracking of the population will be the next major civil rights issue - not just from gun background checks, but also from all the other organizations that track us in real life and on the internet (hell, there are at least 3 different trackers on this web page itself - ForeSee, DoubleClick, ScoreCard Research and that count is rather low, time.com has at least 5, glennbeck.com has at least 7 trackers).

I say this as someone who worked on the development of IAFIS for the implementation of the Brady Bill's background check system. I've seen this stuff from the inside and the feature/mission creep over the years is worrisome.

This article is nominally about warrantless wiretapping but the issues it touches on apply even moreso to "warrantless databasing" - basically the situation where the daily details of everybody's lives are recorded and accessible to the government and the well-connected.
http://articles.latimes.com/2008/mar/16/opinion/op-sanchez16

I'll take it one step further and say that background checks are really of limited usefulness. The problem isn't the lunatic with a gun - those guys kill less than 100 people a year and the number of people killed in spree shootings has been declining over the years. Compare that to the roughly 13,000 total gun killings in the US. The vast majority of those are part of some other crime - my impression, although I have not found any stats to prove or debunk this, is that it is drug related. I believe that decriminalizing drugs would prevent well over 10,000 gun killings each year - we can save all those lives by reducing government rather than increasing it. Get the number of criminally motivated gun killings down below a 1,000 and then we can worry about that rare lunatic getting his hands on a gun.

That is incorrect. The Nazis didn't impose gun restrictions on the German population as often claimed in America. In fact the Nazis made the Weimar Republic's very restrictive laws on guns softer. Nazi Germany's laws on guns were more restrictive than the U.S. laws on guns, but that was due to the different histories and cultures Europe and America have. Come to Europe today. Try to buy weapons in any European country (except Switzerland maybe) and you'll see you won't be allowed to buy guns as easily as in the U.S.

The "Nazi Gun Restriction" hoax is another example of faked Reductio ad hitlerum similar to many others (example: The Americans love dogs? Fine. Let's tell them that Hitler is killing all Germany's dogs, so that they will hate him. No matter Nazi Germany was the 1st European country that imposed laws on the protection of animals.

That's not opinion, that's science. And science is one cold hearted bitch with a 14 inch strap on!

Sorry, but this is incorrect, as other users have already explained. The gun registration laws as well as laws severely regulating gun ownership were already in place when Hitler came into power. It was actually made into law during the Weimar Republic (the successor of the German Empire) right after World War ONE.

And here's the thing. It wasn't Hitler who wrote it. It wasn't even Germans. It was actually part of the Treaty of Versailles, and one of the conditions imposed by the Allies to prevent Germany from arming itself again for another world war.

It failed when Hitler came into power. He wrote a new gun law that actually relaxed the old ones. But only for the "Aryan" Germans. Prior to that, the Hitler Jugend had to train with shovels (go ahead google that). If that law had held, the Nazis would have no army.