Limiting the size, caliber and/or capacity of a firearm is a fool's errand. To imagine, or think, it will save lives is tantamount to buying into that email I received guaranteeing 79,000 percent return on a single investment.
Chicago has no gun stores within its municipal boundaries. Yet it owns the title of Murder Capital of the U.S. 'Tis a cruel irony that the former would foment the latter, but such are the best laid plans of pundits and politicians.
I imagine a system that allows for an instantaneous background check. One whereby a driver's license could be swiped through a simple go/no-go device installed at every store that sells guns and ammunition. If an individual with a history of mental illness, prescribed psychotropic medications and/or any other prohibition by law, the vendor would simply return the individual's license and inform them of their purchasing limitations.
Being tied into such a system, that individual's presence in a gun-selling establishment could also be immediately flagged for follow-up by law enforcement. The bugaboo comes with connecting all of the pertinent databases required for such a system to work. And honestly, the establishment of such a system would most likely become problematic in itself as Edward Snowden has so aptly proved.
Full disclosure, I am a lapsed member of the NRA, a former shooting competitor and a persistent gun owner. I've learned that gun laws, as with any law, only affect the law-abiding and never the law-breaker. We should use technology to better protect us from the deranged, addled, radicalized and sad sick souls among us that should not possess a firearm.
J.C. Collier, Lakeland