Drug addiction essentially is a mental illness and should be treated as such. The money put into the War on Drugs would be far better spent on addiction treatment, counseling, and prevention. Decriminalization and taxation would further supplement funding, and law enforcement and the judicial and prison systems would have a lighter burden and could focus on violent offenders.

I can accept a temporary ban on rights, if due process is still followed, if it is truly temporary. In most states it's not and efforts to create a system for reinstating rights in exchange for federal funding for NICS enforcement have been voted down consistently by the Democrats.

The thing is though, any restriction of rights must be as narrowly focused as possible otherwise it does end up "taking my guns away" or the guy down the street, or some dude I've never met. Life is precious. So are our civil liberties. There's a reason our country was founded on giving up our lives before giving up our liberties.

Of course safe storage is important. Like I said, I support the free trigger programs. I support tax breaks or credits for safe storage equipment. I support safe storage education.

I do not, however, support mandatory storage laws. For one, they're literally unenforceable until after they've already been broken without incredibly massive government intrusion into our homes. If you think NICS is ineffective then apply that principle to a law that requires active physical participation and inspection by LEOs. Second, we don't punish the victims of a crime, let alone expect those victims to report that they require being punished. And mandatory storage laws have already been addressed by SCOTUS and are unconstitutional.

I can accept reasonable burdens on drug companies. Stifling research and development doesn't help anyone.

If I've passed a background check to buy the firearm then yes, being required to do so over and over again is a burden. We assume innocence, not guilt, and the burden to enforce prohibited possessor laws lies with local law enforcement.

And do you really think someone who has broken the law to the point of being a prohibited possessor is going to have qualms about hiding their guns before they attend this predictably scheduled background check?

It's also entirely unenforceable without a national registry, which is just a nonstarter to begin with. You wanna see gun rights groups go full bore, then propose a registry. But without one, how am I identified as having firearms in the first place? How does law enforcement know I still have them or legitimately got rid of them at the time of my scheduled background check? And again, this is another system that both places further burden on a system that already fails regularly.

And drug and gang violence, repeat offenders, and domestic abusers account for almost all gun homicides, per the FBIs universal crime report.

The solutions to gun violence barely, if at all, involve guns except in the most remote of terms. These solutions also require profound and expensive changes to deeply rooted systems that require prominent and incredibly influential individuals and industries to admit they're wrong and accept change. That's never going to happen if the immediate, instant, and effectively distracting reaction is always GUNS ARE BAD.