>>>My point is exactly that like most utopian "solutions" this is rhetoric, not policy. Making people responsible for their behavior is practical - if not popular. But trying top-down decrees regulating what people can do or have where it does not impinge on someone else's rights doesn't work and never has.
>>
>>What would you think about approaching this problem from a liability perspective? Make gun owners liability for whatever happens with their guns. Seems to me an insurance market would arise and would push gun owners to have better gun safes and so forth.
>>
>>Tamar
>
>Absolutely in favor ! And I guess insurance would be in there somewhere, but I am thinking legal responsibility - especially for a gun that was "stolen" but not reported as such until it was found to be a murder weapon.
>

(snip)

I don't know if you read a lot of detective fiction but the latest Harry Bosch book by Michael Connelly hinges on exactly such a gun, with the wrinkle that the murder was 20 years earlier. (After a career of going his own way and pissing off the LAPD power hierarchy he is now working cold cases).