I'm concerned about your rhetoric because I've invested more money in guns than you'll ever spend on "airplanes".cb1000rider wrote:The DSM is hardly new. And remember, it's the "scientific" manual that labelled homosexuality a mental disorder for decades. It's hardly infallable, like most of science.howdy wrote:Maybe this is the way we keep guns out of the hands of the crazies...
I assume it'd be relatively easy to get "liberalism" in there also?
I'm a pilot, so *anything* that might go into that manual or the use of any medication used to treat anything in that manual (generally) takes away my privileged to fly an airplane. I'm very concerned about it because I spent a lot more money on airplanes than guns.
What is interesting to me, is there about 10x as many firearm related deaths and something like 20x as many suicides as there were general aviation fatalities. Yet outside of a self-assessment at time of purchase, we do very little to qualify gun ownership as it relates to mental health.
I realize that any sort of new regulation or hurdle around gun ownership or purchase is going to go over on this forum less favorably than a bag of bricks. I also note that government regulations that started off with good intent get bent and broken to political purpose.
However - and I'll say this out loud: It might be appropriate to come up with some sort of procedure that links legitimately diagnosed people who have long term mental illness to the firearm purchasing process. Facilitating LESS negative firearms incidents is in the best interest of expanding (back) our 2nd amendment rights.
How we do that without opening the door to even more 2nd amendment erosion.. I dunno...
Of the double guns I own, selling any one of the top, value wise, 28 would provide me with the funds needed to acquire some pretty nice small aircraft.
And they are just a portion of a collection that's been growing and evolving for 40 years.
Let's look at your statistics. 300,000,000 firearms vs. 300,000 registered aircraft. Comparing use and availability, we would need at minimum, 100 times more firearm related deaths and 50 times as many suicides to reach meaningful equivalence. We don't even need to cite relative difference in access between the two or the training/skill set needed to operate them.
Using the anti-gun mindset and your stats, general aviation should be criminalized and/or banned. At the very least the tax dollars spent to fund infrastructure that supports it should be withdrawn. That would certainly eliminate the chances of folks having dinner at home, welcoming a Cessna as an uninvited guest.