Support the troops? This beats hell out of a yellow ribbon on your car.

[flamin lib]

How To Get To Bipartisan Consensus On Firearms

http://www.courant.com/opinion/op-ed/hc-op-cornell-gun-laws-0315-20150313-story.html

As long as there have been guns in America, there has been regulation.
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Safe storage laws date back to the Colonial era. In the decades after the adoption of the Second Amendment, gun regulation intensified. It is easy to forget that one goal of the Second Amendment is the "security of a free state." The Founders understood the dangers of anarchy as much as they feared the threat of tyranny. The Second Amendment does not create a barrier to regulation — it requires regulation.
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Among the ideas being discussed are:

•*A number of studies have demonstrated that removing firearms from high-risk situations saves lives. The availability of firearms increases the likelihood that an attempted suicide will succeed. The Israeli Defense Forces has learned this lesson. When faced with an alarmingly high rate of suicide, the IDF restricted the ability of soldiers to take their weapons home. This simple change in policy helped reduce suicide rates by 40 percent.

•Removing guns from scenes of domestic violence will also reduce gun violence. An abused woman is five times as likely to be killed if her abuser owns a firearm. Sensible laws do save lives.

•Gun safes and safe storage laws make everyone safer. Legislators ought to encourage safe gun ownership and use and reward such practices with tax incentives.

•Requiring more rigorous training for gun owners will make everyone safer. The armed forces provide some of the best and most rigorous training in firearms use, and it makes little sense to require veterans who qualified in the military to pass civilian tests. We should take a cue from the armed forces and raise the mandatory training requirements for obtaining a firearm, especially for carrying a firearm in public.

•The requirements for obtaining a concealed carry permit in most parts of America, including Connecticut, are a joke. Consider this disturbing fact: Studies demonstrate that most trained police officers fail to hit their targets at close range during life and death situations. Contrary to the NRA's slogan, if you give a good guy a gun, in most cases you get a person who will miss the target in a real-life situation 75 percent of the time.

*We lose 22 veterans a DAY to suicide. Removing guns from veterans who may be a danger to themselves, even temporarily, could save more than 3000 veterans a year. That beats hell out of a yellow ribbon on your car.