I don't advocate a return to "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" or the regimen of prefrontal lobotomy which left Rosemary Kennedy a zombie for 64 years, but the pendulum has swung too far the other way. Both Loughner and Holmes (Giffords & Aurora) should have been off the street. Both of their colleges began action against them to keep them away from the insitutions but today's paradigm prohibited timely commitment to custodial treatment for them.

So, not a single item in this stupid laundry list to address the real problem, the inability to commit seriously disturbed people to immediate and effective long term custodial care. They want to disarm the law abiding population not fix a real problem. Of 62 mass shootings(5 deaths or more) since 1980 fully 42 had documented mental illness histories, 16 had a status of unclear or unknown and only 4 definitively had no record of such. So, let's not do something that could reduce mass shootings by 2/3. Let's pass something to make us feel good yet do no good.

Lady, I have four degrees and I can back every bit of data I use from multiple official sources.

Excellent point - the math is just about 50% more households with guns but 550% higher homicide rate. Your point on heterogeneous is correct. What also needs to be said is that culturally (common value system) we were much more homogeneous a half century ago. I also contend that we are much more individualistic than most other societies but are very cooperatively orderly as opposed to the coercive orderliness of much of the world.

It's the "Rights of the Mentally Ill" crowd responsible for this. Prior to about 1968-70 both Loughner and Holmes (Gifford & Aurora) would have been in custodial treatment. Both of the colleges they were attending had started actions to get them treated and removed from their institutions but our current system no longer allows for efficient commitment nor are today's facilities geared toward the long term custodial treatment to assure their and our safety.

US Homicide rate – 2.97 per 100,000 Swiss Homicide rate – 0.70 per 100,000 US households with guns – 43% Swiss households with guns – 29% The Swiss all serve in the militia until at least 30 years old and have the option of retaining their personal weapon after service. The weapon is returned to the factory, has the full auto capability disabled and the weapon is returned to the individual. Somehow this empirical data leads me to think we should be looking at something other than the guns. PS Gun Homicides are down in the US from 14000 at the end of the assault weapons ban to under 9000 today. What if the ban is reinstated and the rate begins to go up? Who do we see about that?

In case your history is a little weak the two Presidents were Truman and Clinton. Eisenhower made have had one year of surplus when he had a Republican Congress but I'm not bothering to look it up.

Good thought.

You can't be serious. All spending originates in Congress and specifically in the House of Representatives and since 1930 the only years that we haven't spent more than we have taken in have been years in which there has been a Republican House. In both cases we had a reluctant Demcratic president who went along with the deal and reaped the rewards of the resulting economic growth in his legacy.

Infringe means to restrict in ANY way. They didn't say PROHIBIT. They said INFRINGE. And the framers of the Constitution were highly literate men who wrote with extreme precision and clarity. So, there should be no restrictions whatsoever on the right of the people to keep military arms. Even the licensing and tax requirement for fully automatic weapons would have been judged non compliant with the Second Amendment by George Mason the primary author of the amendment.

Infringe means to restrict in ANY way. They didn't say PROHIBIT. They said INFRINGE. And the framers of the Constitution were highly literate men who wrote with extreme precision and clarity. So, there should be no restrictions whatsoever on the right of the people to keep military arms. Even the licensing and tax requirement for fully automatic weapons would have been judged non compliant with the Second Amendment by George Mason the primary author of the amendment.