Not "ban them all". Not "guns don't kill people". I mean, really, this is the kind of discussion that ought to be going on in this country.

As a citizen of the Republic, I recognize that the last paragraph is problematic (see the 10th Amendment). Gun control advocates want a solution yesterday, but we're looking at long, deliberate, state-by-state efforts to achieve a consensus. Not Prohibition, but women's suffrage.

Also, the issue of transporting weapons from home to the range or the gunsmith, or hunting lands, which would include the contracted hunting of pest animals on private land, will have to be nailed down. If you take it off your property (or is it out of the building which is your home?), it's out in public. So the transportation of guns will have to be closely described, to include people who don't have their own cars. There are ways to disable guns temporarily, which vary according to what it is, and mustn't require specialized equipment at the destination to render the thing operable again. Secure gun boxes, like the ones for bedrooms, which are reasonably portable might work for handguns, but rifles would need something else. One can say that the weapon must be unloaded; however, any responsible gun user knows that every gun is loaded until you check it yourself.

This also doesn't address the issue of guns that people lose track of. A gun bought long ago, thrown in a desk, kept in a box in the attic, kept at a cabin that's not regularly inhabited... It doesn't matter whether a gun is registered if the registered owner doesn't know where it is. Will there be a yearly audit by the BATF, in which every owner of a registered gun will have to fill out and sign a legally binding form specifying that the owner has seen the gun and affirms that the gun is still in the owner's possession? In the case of a lost gun, will every owner be required to report the loss immediately? (Most people will report a theft immediately.) Will this be a federal activity, or will this be left to the states?