Limits on gun rights
Martin Pritikin suggests trying to find a balance that both pro- and anti-gun groups could support:
It seems to me there are two legitimate purposes for gun ownership: self-defense, and hunting. Even if brandishing a weapon can scare off an attacker or home intruder, and even if that happens hundreds of thousands of times per year, in how many of those instances did the fact that the gun had a 40- or 100-round magazine make the difference in scaring off the attacker? And how many hunters need dozens or hundreds of rounds to shoot a deer?
Admittedly, I am a city dweller who has never handled a gun, so I may be speaking from ignorance. But there should be a baseline of assumptions about gun control—such as it should not be possible to purchase a 100-round magazine for a semi-automatic assault rifle—that most reasonable people should agree on, and that no politician should find it dangerous to endorse. That is the naively optimistic part of me. The realist knows it is not so. But if we resign ourselves to the idea that these massacres are simply part of the “cost of doing business” associated with the right to bear arms, that is a tragedy unto itself.
