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By Root 1129 0

or over first acquire a license-to-purchase. Yes, we are talking here about licensing gun owners. To qualify for the license, each consumer would have to pass a criminal background check and take an ATF-certified course covering firearms law, the use of deadly force, and safe gun-handling, and including lectures on the most common forms of firearms accidents, the importance of cleaning a gun, and how best to keep that gun out of the hands of children. It would be nice, but certainly not mandatory, if such a course also included a film or some other means of demonstrating the damage real bullets do to real people. Scare films of the kind I envision here were a staple of driver’s education classes at my high school: one image, of bodies strewn around a head-on wreck caused by a drunk driver, stays with me even now just as vividly as ever.

These purchase provisions also would:

♦ Require license applicants to demonstrate minimum proficiency with a handgun and a rifle. An appropriate firearm would be supplied to them for use during their training course. (Many firing ranges already provide rental guns, even machine guns.) Licensees would have to renew their licenses and undergo a new background check every five years, but the renewal process would be accomplished simply by mailing ATF a form attached to the original license. ATF would charge a licensing fee meant to recoup some of the program costs. The license would, of course, include a photograph of the holder, and such vital statistics as his age, height, weight, and the color of his eyes.

♦ Allow successful applicants to acquire guns in any state and to transport guns to any state. A rigorous licensing program would allow states and cities to lessen their vigilance and thus alleviate a good many of the headaches now endured by hunters, private detectives, and even state and local law-enforcement officers when they travel or relocate from one part of the country to another.

♦ Designate the use or manufacture of a counterfeit license a felony, with a mandatory sentence of five years in federal prison.

♦ Prohibit minors, as now, from acquiring handguns and rifles, and set the minimum age for purchases of both at twenty-one. (Currently federal law allows a minor to acquire a rifle when he turns eighteen. He must be twenty-one to buy a handgun.)

♦ Limit purchases of handguns to one a month. The law, however, would also establish a mechanism for exempting collectors and others with a compelling reason for buying more than one handgun at a time.

♦ Establish a waiting period of ten working days, both to provide a cooling-off period for consumers intent on killing themselves or others in a fit of passion, and to allow ATF to verify that the purchase license is still valid. A fresh criminal-record check would be unnecessary. The law would include a provision for emergency exemptions in situations where a gun buyer can demonstrate an immediate threat to life and limb if he cannot have his gun immediately. The Brady bill’s five-day waiting period will provide a welcome pause in gun transactions, but only for five more years, after which the pause will be eliminated and replaced by an instant criminal background check. This is an optimistic expectation given the complexity of developing any computer system capable of searching the databases of fifty states in any period of time even broadly qualifying as “instant.”

♦ Enact a nationwide version of the parental-liability laws now in force in Florida and California, which hold parents criminally liable if their children wound themselves or others using an improperly stored firearm.

These purchase provisions would, at the very least, compel consumers to recognize the grave dangers and responsibilities inherent in owning a firearm. The buyer-licensing program alone would save lives simply by requiring consumers to learn about the weapons they hope to acquire.

III. DESIGN

The Life and Liberty Preservation Act would include provisions aimed at restricting the firepower of consumer guns, improving the design of guns to make them