A few links you might find interesting:
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Copies of original historical sources on the Second Amendment.
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My testimony on the Second Amendment.
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A list of people and organizations who have called for broad bans on guns, or on handguns. This is the reason I’m skeptical of claims that “no one is seriously proposing to ban or confiscate all guns. You hear that only from the gun lobby itself, which whistles up this bogeyman whenever some reasonable regulation is proposed.”
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While we’re talking of slippery slope fears — and, hey, you’ve made slippery slope arguments, too, whether you’re liberal, conservative, or libertarian, you might just make them on different subjects (for instance, abortion, privacy, free speech) than others do — here’s my article on the subject, plus a shorter version that I cowrote for Legal Affairs. It’s a scholarly piece, not a political one; and, trust me, there’s something in it for people all over the political map.
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In case we get into the perennial assault weapons debates, here’s a quote from Tom Diaz of the Violence Policy Center, NPR, Mar. 11, 2004: “If the existing assault weapons ban expires, I personally do not believe it will make one whit of difference one way or another in terms of our objective, which is reducing death and injury and getting a particularly lethal class of firearms off the streets.” Here’s one from Charles Krauthammer, Wash. Post, Apr. 5, 1996, at A19, who is a proponent of a total gun ban:
Its [the assault weapons ban’s] only real justification is not to reduce crime but to desensitize the public to the regulation of weapons in preparation for their ultimate confiscation . . . . De-escalation begins with a change in mentality . . . . The real steps, like the banning of handguns, will never occur unless this one is taken first . . .
And here’s a recent source that makes clear that (1) assault weapons “were used in only a small fraction of gun crimes prior to the ban: about 2% according to most studies and no more than 8%” (PDF page 7) and (2) the differences between assault weapons and other guns are in large part cosmetic (things like whether it has a bayonet mount, or a folding stock) (PDF page 11).
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