Today's issue comes from a John McCain speech a few days ago where the Arizona Senator sounded the alarm about Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton wanting to reduce gun owner's rights.
Perhaps ironically, John McCain has proposed legislation to make it more difficult to purchase guns at gun shows. From the Arizona Senator's website:
At a time when some were trying to shut down gun shows in the name of fighting crime, John McCain tried to preserve gun shows by standardizing sales procedures. Federal law requires licensed firearm sellers at gun shows to do an instant criminal background check on purchasers while private firearm sellers at gun shows do not have to conduct such a check. John McCain introduced legislation that would require an instant criminal background check for all sales at gun shows and believes that such checks must be conducted quickly to ensure that unnecessary delays do not effectively block transactions.
Barack Obama's position appears to be pro-gun:
As a former constitutional law professor, Barack Obama believes the Second Amendment creates an individual right, and he greatly respects the constitutional rights of Americans to bear arms.
and then he hedges his bets
He will protect the rights of hunters and other law-abiding Americans to purchase, own, transport, and use guns for the purposes of hunting and target shooting. He also believes that the right is subject to reasonable and commonsense regulation.
Interestingly, Congress managed to violate the previously inviolable Commerce Clause when it passed the "Gun Free School Zones Act" which made it a federal crime for a person to bring a gun to a school. The Supreme Court ruled that possession of a gun is not interstate commerce, and the law was unconstitutional. This raises the issue of whether the Illinois Senator will realize if one of his "commonsense" regulations violates the constitution. He has stated he supports the outright ban on handguns in the District of Columbia as way for reducing "illegal gun possession."
Hillary Clinton's position reflects incredible honesty:
I am against illegal guns, and illegal guns are the cause of so much death and injury in our country. I also am a political realist and I understand that the political winds are very powerful against doing enough to try to get guns off the street …
So, there you have it, she likes the idea of doing something, but admits that she can't.
My final thought is that the issue, is kind of silly because it relies on the false premise that control will necessarily yield less crime. John Stossel has gone over this issue in detail, and I won't rehash his reasoning here. He notes that there is no relation, because, like anything else, a black market will exist for illegal products and criminals will get their guns from there.