I'm convinced the town I work in is full of crazy people.

[kandrathe]

But somewhere in life, I realized that you have to account for the Lowest Common Denominator in things like this, and I decided that Automatic Weapons are not the type of thing that I think need to be obtainable by Joe Schmoe.

Where do you stop? You can't handle that kind of horsepower, you get to drive a lawn mower to work.

If my neighbor, Joe Schmoe, had a bunch of RPG's I'd be fine with it. He's a sane and reasonable fellow, not prone to irresponsible use. But, you are correct in that there needs to be a reasonable line between the potential misuse of a butter knife and a thermo-nuclear weapon. So, for example, when it comes to flying on a plane, it seems we cannot trust anyone with even a butter knife. But, I don't see too much difference in having to press the trigger 16 times, versus once. It hardly matters to those down range. The key thing here is that the purpose of owning the weapon is in that it is meant to kill people effectively. We either give that power to the non-felon, sane, citizen, or we don't.

Who gets to determine your capabilities, and limitations? I think our system, while imperfect, assumes that within reason, until you mess up, you are responsible for those things you do/own. In practice, we've often neutered our freedoms on the off chance someone "might" misuse them. We legislate by extreme anecdotes, rather than by real data and statistics. It is probably good common sense to be hyper cautious on the thermo-nuclear end of the spectrum, but it becomes ridiculous as we've practiced it with possible misuse of butter knives whilst flying.