you are arguing for prior restraint. You are confusing a legal action with a subsequent illegal action
I'm arguing for status-based restraint, which is a little different I'd say.
I may have said this elsewhere, but I'm really not interested in trying to expand gun control as it is. SCOTUS was clear and frankly, I think they were right. I don't like the 2nd, but it's there and it's not going anywhere.
I do at least want restrictions that prevent people with severe mental illness (and that
is a rabbit hole to argue about) recent-ish felons from buying firearms lawfully. If they buy them, well, that's what possession laws are there to deter/punish. They're not perfect, but I've seen them work in action with clients. I also want restrictions on types of weapons sold. I see no need for private citizens to be able to get loaded up in full military gear.
I'll accept where we are. The core is self-defense, with consideration of the militia clause (sixty pages in ten words?). So, you can't have restrictions that effectively disable use of a weapon within the time it would need to be used in the home if someone invaded. Fine. Then you have restrictions for how to carry it in public, just like you have other restrictions on deadly objects of utility. I'm fine with that.
The only real debate on that front seems to be about how the divergence between military and civilian armament since the revolution should effect the interpretation of the 2nd, in light of the hundreds of opinions that ended up resulting in the 2nd Am compromise.
This is more a difference in what counts between us as an absolute principle than any other sort of debate. I tend to focus on the protections of persons the government wants to throw in prison as the things that need the more absolute principles. I suppose that's to be expected.
When it comes to dealing with a potentially dangerous object versus some right of possession, or just about any other principle, I tend to bow more to pragmatism over all else. Hence, I am amenable to arguments focusing on the effectiveness or not of gun control laws. But I simply cannot agree that ownership of a gun is so important that we cannot have any of these "prior" or "status" restraints.
Hence, my comment about impasse: you seem to see this as a much more absolute principle than I do.
Perhaps the only way for either of us to make headway is to pop over to the Philosophy section and have a proper academic philosophical debate about this: how to determine what is and is not an absolute "right", tests of the absoluteness of that right, perhaps even a discussion of what the quality of absoluteness consists in. So on and so forth, all aimed at the overall question of
why should ownership of one specific instrument of death - a firearm - should be absolute as compared to other rights we declared in the constitution. Maybe even the related debate of whether there even are any true natural rights, declaration notwithstanding - that is, objectively real in the universe - or whether the only rights that truly exist are those a society/world chooses to enforce. Etc.
I'm game, over time. But otherwise, impasse I think
