No more anonymous guns

With a mass shooting literally daily in the U.S., surely we've had enough. I wanted to avoid the subject, which has been pretty well covered. Yet, the several recent mass murders won't let me. I think they won't let most Americans, not any more.

Sure, gun-rights absolutists (a.k.a. those financed by gun and ammo makers) have had decades of success with the slippery slope scare tactic. That is, if you further regulate guns in even the smallest way, you really are coming for everyone's guns. We jsut can't allow that, so they say.

Meanwhile, we have a very conservative Supreme Court that has gone with the broadest possible support for Second Amendment individual gun ownership rights. An Australian-style combo buyback and confiscation of military-grade weapons is out of the question here. 

And yet, let us keep some perspective. Some guns are outlawed. Think full-automatic machine guns, bazookas, rocket launchers and such. We have managed to do such banning without sliding down any slopes at all. I propose moderately annoying rules, annoying at least to those who feel they need a dozen or two dozen high-powered weapons and the right to display and carry them everywhere they go.

For absolutism, we absolutely need to halt private, undocumented sales. We absolutely need to have a background check for every gun sold. We absolutely need to register every gun to its purchaser. We absolutely need to require insurance or bonds for every gun sold, along the model of automobiles. 

The incessant multiple murders should speak louder to us than the gun lobbyists do to lawmakers at the federal and state levels. Gun crazies, political, religious or just unhinged, give us no choice.