My Letter to the President.

CC: Senator Diane Feinstein
Senator Barbra Boxer
Representative Judy Chu

17 December 2012

A Solution to Guns in America

Dear Mr. President,

Thank you for your noble words on Sunday. They were poignant and powerful and I believe you spoke for our nation. Our nation grieves for those children and brave women who lost their lives in that tragedy. I was given a spark of hope during your speech that something, finally, was going to change.

I learned today that Senator Diane Feinstein is proposing a new assault weapons ban. I am 100% for this and I couldn’t be prouder to have her one of my Senators from the great state of California.

This ordeal has gotten me thinking a lot about how this whole gun/ 2nd Amendment issue should be handled. Before I go into my proposed solution in detail I want to say that we forget sometimes that the 2nd Amendment was written in a different time in a much different America. We must acknowledge and take responsibility for our violent past and our violent nature. America is a country born of violence. We took this land by force. Killed or isolated the native population to make way for our objectives. We enslaved an entire race of people with violence and force. When this amendment was written there weren’t 50 states. You could go out to the “Wild” west and stake a claim in land that you “discovered” and to keep it you had to kill animals as well as people. There weren’t local, state and federal police like there is now. It was up to you to safeguard your rights.

Now we are an evolved society. We are innovators and dreamers and we have created the capability to go to the moon and back. We have made machines that are no bigger than a lighter yet they can hold over 1000 songs for us to listen to whenever and wherever we please. Yet for some reason, that can only be attributed to our violent birth, we cling to killing machines. We must move forward. We must not stay in the past. We are in a brave new world, it is time we finally took our first steps in it.

This assault ban being proposed by Senator Feinstein is a good first step. And that step must be achieved. The next step is gun ownership reform. Without using up further space here to draw all of the comparisons between current gun ownership and other licences let me just put forth my proposal:

Step One:
Guns and ammunition can only be bought and sold in licensed and permitted single function, aka gun shop only shops. No trade shows, pawn shops, Goodwills, Wal Marts or any other location, including online, can buy or sell these items.

Step Two:
a. Before any person can own a gun they must be 21 years of age.
b. They must enroll in a gun training academy.
(Since everyone is worried about the economy still this is a job creator moment for you Sir. Part of this proposal involves the creation of Gun Training Academies Nationwide that will be staffed with Veterans and other law enforcement personnel to put any prospective gun buyer through a course with theory as well as practical portions with guns. They would learn about guns, how to care for them properly and be required to assemble and disassemble them. Then they would learn how to fire a gun properly and do hours on a range. Minimum of 20.)
c. They would then have to pass both a written and firing test in order to get a gun licence. This would be issued by the states similar to a drivers licence with picture and address.
d. At this point a person could purchase a gun.

Step Three of this reform is to create a database of all of this information. A central Gun Owner Database which would hold their licence and test data as well as the serial numbers for all the guns they purchased. Similar to the database that holds DMV data. So when a gun is sold again by the owner they would have to file for a change of ownership just like a person selling a car does.

I would love to see a database of bullet striations so that law enforcement would know immediately who owned the gun that had been used in any crime but that may be too large a project for right now.

I believe the steps that I am proposing here are reasonable and would bring about a more educated and responsible gun owner.

Thank you again for all you have done Mr. President, and all you will do. I look forward to working with you to solve this for America.

With respect and love,
Nora Crest