And I'm not saying that. I am saying that the reason military grade explosives, grenades, rockets, etc aren't popping up being used by bad guys is largely due to the immense amount of restrictions being placed on their distribution. I do believe the current restrictions should be relaxed, but not fully opened.
I think it's pretty easy to say something that by the nature of it's design is to kill everything within a certain radius is an indiscriminate weapon.
I guess we'll just agree to disagree.
Mike
To be honest I doubt most of that would really change in a minimally regulated environment. The people that make the stuff commercially would likely go to great lengths to control the proliferation of their product due to liability reasons alone. It's easy to indemnify liability on a firearm, because typically when someone gets hurt there is a guy right there aiming the gun and pulling the trigger. Yeah, some would leak out, but I doubt you would be seeing mortar rockets showing up at a gun show anytime soon. The market conditions on some of that stuff would still be very similar to what exists now, except the market would be more grey than black.
I can kind of see justifying -local- regulations for storage, based on the whole "community danger" bit, but even then how are you going to have enforcement without some sort of infringement? You'd have to have passive regulation for it to not be infringing. EG, something along the lines of "Sure, you can buy all the C4 if you want, but if your house blows up and kills people there will be serious criminal liability problems!"
Also, be aware that there are a bunch of catch all laws on the books which would already fit people who would do such things. Not to mention the civil liability aspect. You could still pass a law which prosecutes negligent storage and have it not be infringing. For example, you could have a law that basically states "If you have more than X lbs of explosive in your house, and your house blows up and kills people, you can be held criminally liable for the unsafe storage". This is the same vein of thought as the child access protection law in NH with guns. You can have all the loaded guns you want in your house. You can have all the toddlers you want in your house with the guns. If a child ACTUALLY gets hurt, or hurts someone with one of your guns, you as the parent are responsible. " I don't completely agree with it, but it is WAAAAAY more sane than a pure outright malum prohibitum type law, which essentially prosecutes someone in all sorts of events where nobody is hurt. Most "gun crimes" are in this vein- the vast majority of prosecutions are cases where nobody was injured as the result of someone possessing a gun or other device. They got prosecuted
just because they had it, which in my mind, is not a good enough reason to send someone to prison.
Food for thought- if these laws are so good, then why is it that every other month someone, somewhere, finds UXO in their house? The laws really stopped all those unsafe conditions!!!
-Mike