In the US, the right to keep and bear arms is not based on principle; it's based on a specific written legal framework -- the Second Amendment to the US Constitution -- the first thirteen words of which everyone conveniently ignores. What happened -- did Madison and Jefferson sit down, and look over the list, and Jim said, "Tom, this one's too short"? And Tom said, "All right, Jim, let's add a few words to it. How about these?" Et la voila?

So how does the "prescription" work in this case? If you get drugs, you take them, you run out, you get a refill until the refills run out. Unless you're shooting someone every once in a while, this prescription will never run out. What happens when your mental capacity changes so you're no longer competent to decide who to shoot (assuming, just for argument's sake, that you were before)? Does the doctor ask you to turn it in? "You'll get my Palm Pistol when you pry it from my cold, dead hand -- unless I get you first, suckah!"

You get old, your hearing goes, your eyesight goes, your cognition goes, your temper goes. So are we going to have old geezers shooting their caregivers when they show up, shooting the meals-on-wheels guy, the neighbor who drops by to check up on them?

I work at a very large software company that recruits worldwide. Recently I counted up the women working in my group. All the women in technical positions were from countries other than the US: French, Chinese, Indian, Canadian. None were from the U.S. It could be a biased sample, of course, but it seems to me representative of the staffing makeup.