to protect my community from the likes of you.
The New York Times published a story reporting that a significant number of the guns recovered on the streets of Chicago came from outside the city, despite Chicago having some of strictest gun laws in the nation. I don't live in Chicago, but in California, which has the (proud, IMO) distinction of having the strictest gun laws of any state. Even so, most illegal guns are flooding into my state from neighboring Nevada and Arizona, places with lax gun laws. In the case of Chicago, the guns are mainly coming from rural areas in Illinois or from Indiana. In other words, the patchwork of laws across the country is creating problems for states and communities who want strong gun regulation. This is why America needs strong federal regulation.
But you gun nuts won't have that. You reserve the "right" to intimidate people you don't like express your so-called "Second Amendment freedoms" even if that means the rest of us have to learn to duck and cover everywhere we go. So your obsession with a dangerous "hobby" trumps my freedom to be able to conduct my life in public without feeling like I'm living in an armed camp. You believe your hobby is more important than my right not to have a stray bullet traveling from a mile away lodge itself in my body after some kook decided to use the sky as target practice. So if you insist on blocking meaningful reform, then I, as a non-gunowner, insist on surrounding my state of California with a border wall, complete with checkpoints and armed (unfortunately necessary) guards that will check all incoming auto traffic at the state line and who will confiscate any firearms before allowing such traffic to enter. Hey, this is just going back to how things used to be anyway. Checking one's firearm at the town border was the law in the Wild West of the 1800s (imagine that, being safer in the Wild West!) How about we go even further? How about requiring that you present an "interstate" passport and visa that must be inspected and stamped before you are allowed to enter my state?
My reasoning in putting forth such ridiculous ideas is that the United States is becoming increasingly balkanized to the point where we are many "nations" entangled together and some of those "nations" (the neo-Confederate, anti-government, gun crazy ones) are trying to strangle the rest. If we can't have some unity when it comes to public safety, then why not just get it over with and break up into 50 countries already?
Here in California, we've got our own loonies to deal with. We shouldn't have to suffer from the ones next door too.