>>I'm saying homicide is "the unlawful taking of a human life with malice aforethought" at common law and that means the person who does the killing does it after thinking about it, then making a plan. Gun control laws only work to limit the law abiding citizen's access to a firearm. Those firearms are purchased to protect people from those same criminals who would have a gun anyway. The emphasis needs to be on stronger sentencing, not on gun removal.
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>Isn't homicide then a catch-all to describe the killing of another human (the roots mean "man kill"), whether it be Murder 1, Murder 2 of manslaughter? Hence not necessarilly with malice aforethought?

I'm not a lawyer, but at one point was a criminal justice major and studied criminal law. Homicide was a common law charge that was brought over from some island in Europe. There were no degrees of homicide. Basically, it means a person killed someone and planned it beforehand. Now that we have a litigious society, we have murder 1 through murder 226.<g>