[Sean]

Originally Posted by bryantm3

since gun licenses are not issued by the federal government, it's not their business. personally, i don't believe the government has a right to know how much income a person makes, so that fact doesn't sit easily with me. i just see it as part of an overall plan to cede more rights to the federal government when the states, for the most part, do just fine on their own. for example, our public school systems began locally and are run by the state/county. i see no reason for the feds to intercede in any way, including funding, unless the school is obviously in trouble and the state can't fix it. it's the same with gun licenses: the federal government should make a limited outline of how it should work, and let the states handle it. it's simply more efficient. we were formed as a federal republic so that individual states can determine how they want to run their government instead of having to answer to the national government. that's outlined in the tenth amendment.

i do agree that it's a matter of gun safety to have a safety test, and although it seems like a good idea, i feel that the government, at any time, could decide to make the test more and more vigorous to prevent people without military or police training to own guns. it just leaves too much room for that. an idea might be a state-by-state rule that if you get a gun license, you have to take a gun safety course from a private instructor within the year, leaving no room for 'tweaks' in the tests.

Very good points. I don't personally subscribe to the idea that testing would be as manipulative as you feel it could be here, but all the stuff about state versus federal and such sounds fair enough to me.