In 1982 the Justice Department tried to tally the number of Federal Criminal laws. After a full two years of investigation among 50 titles and 23K pages of law, they approximated 3,000. However, they could not come up with an exact count because of the breadth and depth of the source material. 32 years later the situation is almost certainly worse.

In 2013 Federal Agencies issued 3,659 final rules. A violation of any of which could tie you up in court for years trying to resolve.

A real-world example: a drug company in the course of making its product was creating as a byproduct: pure water. They wanted to dump it into a nearby body of water, even going to far as offering to precisely add salt to avoid disrupting the salinity of the body of water. The EPA refused saying it was industrial waste, even though chemically it was saltwater, nothing more.

Part of the theory behind the rule of law is that the common man has to be able to understand the rules in which he operates. Otherwise one is living in an environment which is functionally equivalent to ex post facto law creation. IE the Red Queen can sentence you if your existence falls under her gaze and displeases her. Right now in the United States there are so many laws and rules that even experts in a particular field cannot say with certainty if a person is in compliance.

It's not that there are three specific federal laws that are broken by everyone daily. It's that there are so many federal laws that in the course of a normal day you're bound to have broken some of them.

Here is a website with some real world felonies people were convicted of that were completely innocent seeming: http://goo.gl/29G7ff

Example 1: A woman purchases imported lobster in clear plastic bags, a violation of HONDURAN laws. That's a felony.

Example 2: A snowmobiler gets lost in a snowstorm and blunders onto federal land. That's a felony.

Example 3: You find your kids' stash of drugs, destroy them and confront your kid. That's a felony.

"And enough with your phony "rifles kill less people" stat. I think I addressed that enough above." -rockout

You "addressed that" when you said, "Your one-liner sounds suspiciously like a made-up statistic found on some pro-gun blog."? You "addressed that" by claiming it sounds like it came from a blog and sounds fake? Please tell me your work has nothing to do with logic or semantics. Please tell me you're not a programmer or a lawyer, because that's so ridiculous I'm nearly convinced you're a pre-teen. It is emphatically not "made up", "phony", fake, duplicitous, cherry-picked, or anything else. It is a statistic collected by the FBI which I linked on request. And you know that.

I was responding to the specific point that knives are less lethal than guns.

There is a strain of stupidity that believes that guns are apex killing devices. That bats, fists, feet, knives and etc are just not that big a deal. You see this in the Trayvon Martin case where everyone keeps saying "unarmed teenager", completely ignoring slamming Zimmerman's head against a sidewalk. Because again, guns are N times more dangerous than blunt objects, where N is a really, really big number.

I'm specifically addressing this when I point out that rifles (even more dangerous than handguns) are used to kill fewer people than fists and feet (by 2x), and fewer people than knives (by 5x).

I am far more concerned with the generic violence category than the more specific gun violence category. People who believe the apex killing devices ideology look at me like I'm crazy, because guns are so terribly very bad horrible that a shooting death is WAY WORSE than a bat bludgeoning death. People who point out that no, it's just as bad get told they're off topic and gun nuts and ammosexuals and tiny pricks and all that rot.

Wait, how am I not "on the up and up" with the data? Because I didn't provide a link?

I made a specific claim, and that claim is correct according to the data the FBI collects. I did provide a link when asked.

Another interesting tidbit, "Personal weapons (hands, fists, feet, etc)" account for more than 2x as many murders as rifles. Ibid.

Here ya go: http://goo.gl/wlhOMI FBI Homicide stats for 2011. Knives or cutting instruments: 1,694. Rifles: 323. That's 5x+ more killings by knives. Thanks for the gratuitous insults though. That really contributed to the conversation.

No, I understand. The less restrictive than UK's law but still too restrictive for US voters "May Issue" has been rejected here.

The problem is, sometimes they're overlooked, sometimes they're not. If you're a parent who has a creepy kid, how bad do they have to be before you get them committed involuntarily? There are hundreds of thousands of really creepy kids out there right this instant, how do you know which ones are going to actually kill?

I actually was roommates in college with a kid who later killed his mother and sister's best friend. He used a knife. His parents tried to get him involuntarily committed, but the judge said they didn't have enough evidence. I knew he was a weird creep, but was he the creepiest person I've ever known? Nope. Did I know he was going to kill someone some day? Nope. Would any of you have known better? I seriously doubt it.

Knife attacks are far less lethal? You might want to tell the FBI who track far more knife killings than rifle killings every year in the US.

Guns were invented as a ranged weapon. On a battlefield you're against another armed person, at a distance, who is well aware of your intentions to kill them. In a school setting, it's easy to get close to another person if your initial intent is hidden. That's why knives in schools are just as deadly and effective as a gun.

In the US this is called a "May Issue" locality. It has been roundly rejected by the voters and almost everywhere is moving to "Shall Issue". Shall issue is when the requesting actor gets a permit as long as they have nothing in their background that disallows gun ownership. This includes felonies and certain non-felonies like domestic violence and forced mental hospital stays.

The reason "May Issue" has been such a failure is people recognized the issuing authorities were using their authority to essentially ban gun ownership. Even people with active, credible death threats against them were told "Nope, not a compelling reason." Yet somehow rich and famous and connected people had no problems getting permits.

The problem with "common sense" gun control is that it's self-flattering nonsense. Nobody believes their hobbyhorse legislative fantasy is stupid and unreasonable. Therefore anything they believe in goes under the rubric of "common sense". When people start talking particulars, it's usually something that's been law forever (yes, in America there are tens of thousands of gun laws), or something that is completely unrelated to actual crime.

For example the current "common sense" restriction playing in the media is "military style rifles". One big problem with this is that it has nothing to do with crime or violence. Every year clubs kill more people than "military style rifles" in the US. Every year fists kill more people than "military style rifles" in the US. Every year knives kill more people than "military style rifles" in the US. This betrays the purpose of the "common sense" restriction. If violence were the issue, these rifles would be far down the list of what's unacceptable. But the black military style rifle looks scary, so it's the subject of interest.

People have this idea of a deadliness continuum where a rifle is the apex killer. It's the most effective thing a person can possibly get their hands on without some sort of direct military connection. That's ridiculous and wrong. Any non-invalid man can kill a person with a baseball bat with two or three strikes to the head. Any teenager can kill a person with a few torso strikes with an easily concealed knife.