Massachusetts State Representative David Linsky’s bill will force gun owners to undergo mental health background checks, acquire liability insurance, pay an additional 25% tax on all forms of ammunition, and require firearms categorized as “assault weapons” to be stored outside of their homes and only at government approved storage depots.
“This bill is a comprehensive effort to reduce all types of gun violence – murders, intentional shootings, accidental shootings and suicides. There is not one solution to reducing gun violence – we can’t eliminate it – but there are a lot of common-sense steps that we can take to significantly reduce the everyday tragedy of gun violence and deaths,” said Linsky.
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“I have spoken with hundreds of people over the past few weeks in developing this legislation – victims, police officers, criminologists, physicians, and yes – gun owners and sportsmen,” stated Linsky. “There are a lot of good ideas out there. We should all have one goal – reducing gun violence and trying to keep more tragedies from happening.”
Provisions in the bill include:
Having one standard of the issuance of all gun licenses, giving local police chiefs the ability to evaluate all aspects of an application for a gun license.
Requires proof of liability insurance for possession of a firearm, rifle or shotgun.
Requires that all large capacity weapons and grandfathered assault weapons must be stored at gun clubs or target ranges.
Requires live shooting as part of the curriculum for a basic firearms safety course; this is not a current requirement.
Requires all applicants for gun licenses and FID cards to sign a waiver of mental health records for review to be destroyed after decision.
Imposes 25% sales tax on ammunition, firearms, shotguns, and rifles; dedicates funds towards firearms licensing, police training, mental health services, and victim’s services.
Brings Massachusetts into compliance with the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS).
Limits gun buyers to one firearm purchase per month.
Richard Buckminster Fuller’s Plan & Quotes:
Ephemeralization – technological advancement has the ability to do more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing. Ephemeralization will result in ever-increasing standards of living for an ever-growing population despite finite resources.
“Dear reader, traditional human power structures and their reign of darkness are about to be rendered obsolete.”
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
“There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly.
“When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty but
when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.”
“I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process – an integral function of the universe.”
“I’m not trying to counsel any of you to do anything really special except dare to think. And to dare to go with the truth. And to dare to really love completely.”
“Humans beings always do the most intelligent thing…after they’ve tried every stupid alternative and none of them have worked”
“Everything you’ve learned in school as “obvious” becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There’s not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.”
“Everyone is born a genius, but the process of living de-geniuses them.”
“Dare to be naive.”
“I am convinced that creativity is a priori to the integrity of the universe and that life is regenerative and conformity meaningless.”
“In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete.”
“Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.”
“I am enthusiastic over humanity’s extraordinary and sometimes very timely ingenuity. If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver. But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings as constituting the only means for solving a given problem.”
“Geniuses are just people who had good mothers.”
“Sometimes I think we’re alone. Sometimes I think we’re not. In either case, the thought is quite staggering”
“If humanity does not opt for integrity we are through completely. It is absolutely touch and go. Each one of us could make the difference.”
“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
“Never forget that you are one of a kind. Never forget that if there weren’t any need for you in all your uniqueness to be on this earth, you wouldn’t be here in the first place. And never forget, no matter how overwhelming life’s challenges and problems seem to be, that one person can make a difference in the world. In fact, it is always because of one person that all the changes that matter in the world come about. So be that one person. ”
“When I was born, humanity was 95 per cent illiterate. Since I’ve been born, the population has doubled and that total population is now 65 per cent literate. That’s a gain of 130-fold of the literacy. When humanity is primarily illiterate, it needs leaders to understand and get the information and deal with it. When we are at the point where the majority of humans them-selves are literate, able to get the information, we’re in an entirely new relationship to Universe. We are at the point where the integrity of the individual counts and not what the political leadership or the religious leadership says to do.”
“When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.”
“Love is omni-inclusive, progressively exquisite, understanding and compassionately attuned to other than self.”
“I am a passenger on the spaceship Earth.”
“I just invent. Then I wait until man comes around to needing what I’ve invented.”
“I figure that the people are now more deeply conscious than ever before in history of the existence and functioning principles of universal, inexorable physical laws; of the pervading, quietly counseling truth within each and every one of us; of the power of love; and–each man by himself–of his own developing, dynamic relationship with his own conception of the Almightiness of the All-Knowing…that our contemporaries just don’t wear their faith on their sleeves anymore…that people have removed faith from their sleeves because they found out for themselves that faith is much too important for careless display. Now they are willing to wait out the days and years for the truthful events, encouraged individually from within; and the more frequently the dramatic phrases advertising love, patriotism, fervent belief, morals, and good fellowship are plagiarized, appropriated and exhibited in the show windows of the world by the propaganda whips for indirect and ulterior motives, no matter how meager the compromise–the more do people withdraw within themselves and shun taking issue with the nauseating perversions, though eternally exhibiting quiet indifference, nonchalance or even cultivating seemingly ignorant acceptance.”
“If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don’t bother trying to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking.”
“Either war is obsolete or men are. ”
“It is essential that everyone know at the outset that I am apolitical. I was convinced in 1927 that humanity’s most fundamental survival problems could never be solved by politics.”
“Only the free-wheeling artist-explorer, non-academic, scientist-philosopher, mechanic, economist-poet who has never waited for patron-starting and accrediting of his co-ordinate capabilities holds the prime initiative today.”
“I am convinced all of humanity is born with more gifts than we know. Most are born geniuses and just get de-geniused rapidly.”
“I would say you are faced with a future in which education is going to be number one amongst the great world industries.”
“primarily the individual is going to study at home.”
“Human beings were given a left foot and a right foot to make a mistake first to the left, then to the right, left again and repeat.”
“The universe is non-simultaneously apprehended”
Oh, and another thing, notice they want to tax YOU so they siphon off the funds for “training”! Sweet Jebus! All the training in the world didn’t get those wankers there any quicker did it? These have to be the best trained goons on the planet. Trained to ignore you, trained to shoot unarmed and innocent civilians, trained to speed recklessly, trained to bully you in your own homes, trained to be the arrogant bastards that they are, trained to janitor up the scene of your demise, trained ultimately to fail you.
So who is speaking against this lunatics proposals in Massachusetts? Where are the cajones?
This is leading up to another Prohibition, and we all know how well THAT went.
First and foremost, the main problem is not guns themselves, but guns in the hands of the wrong people, mainly criminals, and criminals don’t care what laws are passed, they do and have what they want. Since nearly all mass shootings occur where guns are not allowed in the first place, what good are rules/laws meant to control those who readily break laws? If the problem is guns in the wrong hands–and that can never be completely prevented–the answer is guns in the right hands; allow properly trained individuals to carry concealed weapons in currently “gun free” areas to defend those who are unarmed. I wonder how many faculty members caught in these school shootings thought, “Damn, I wish I had my gun right now!” Another point supporting this line of thought is that these assailants KNOW there are no guns there and the people are defenseless. If they thought there might be someone there able to respond in kind, they will likely think twice about doing it in the first place, and, if not, at least their shooting spree could be cut much shorter.
I want to express CONCEALED and TRAINED. I think a significant number of faculty members, likely mostly men, would be interested in undergoing advanced training and quietly carrying a weapon in exchange for a small monthly addition to their paycheck, providing the public with a sort of insurance against such extensive massacres. A perfect solution? No,of course not, but this isn’t a perfect world and, despite the dreams of unrealistic “liberals”, it can never possibly be a perfect world, but statistics show that where gun freedom is at its highest extent, gun violence is at its lowest.
The argument “we don’t want a wild-west scenario” doesn’t “wash”, because, even with so many men carrying guns on their hips, the per-capita murder rate was extremely low. Why? because everyone knew, if you pulled your gun, anyone else could pull theirs and you might die, yourself. Pretty good deterant, huh? Better than some wimpy little words and rules on a paper somewhere.
L.K. Meanoss
Your points are all exactly on-target, as we say in gun world 🙂
I’m not sure about calling it “Prohibition”.
On the one hand, it might remind people of a failed policy and work. On the other, it might lead to complacency; because Prohibition was repealed successfully.
This is different. This will NEVER be repealed once in force; because it will be the end of freedom.
It’s that serious.
This sounds like the clover plan to rid the roads of bicyclists.
To require insurance, registration, licensing, safety regulation, etc and so on…. to drive the costs and annoyances so high that few will do it.
How about gun safety courses taught at high schools?
What about all the (largely ignored) side effects of all the mind altering medications that can lead to suicide and overly-aggressive behavior? http://medicalwhistleblower.blogspot.com/2011/09/mass-violence-caused-by-anti.html
How ’bout an invite to go with? This site has so many broken links its good that it works (for now) but you need to be invited!