Another Good-Faith Test

I think there's a good-faith test on the matter of gun control, too. I think it's much more applicable to the right-wingers, because we on the left of this issue are likely to support any form of gun control no matter how mild if the alternative is nothing. The test is that I think all persons playing the game in good conscience, that is, with the well-being of society being their primary goal, ought to support a rigorous system of background checks etc. designed to keep guns out of the hands of people that we have any prior knowledge of as being violent and/or mentally unstable. Jared Lee Loughner was known to have mental problems. He got a gun. Guns + crazy people = dead people. There should be a system where somebody, either the campus police who arrested him five times or the Army officials who turned him down or the principal of his school or someone, gets to put him on a "you can't buy guns" list. And then he shouldn't be able to buy a gun. Yes, there are black-market guns, but that doesn't mean the white market should make it easy on people who are known to have violent and/or loony tendencies.

If someone who is a gun-rights advocate also opposes things like keeping people on the terrorist watch lists on the "you can't buy guns" list, or other similar measures, what is left to discern of their motives? I can think of only two: one is that the person in question is primarily interested in the profits of the gun manufacturers, and the other is that the person welcomes the wanton violence and destruction and killing that guns in the hands of crazy people and known terrorists is certain to bring.