I completely get the whole small government thing. I personally consider myself an anarchist and that's pretty much as small a government as you can get. I hope I didn't offend you in anyway, I just couldn't help but find the irony in it. It would be like if a car mechanic told you not to trust mechanics because they often make up problems to get more money out of you. He's pretty much saying "trust me, you can't trust people like me... except for me." The point is clear, just slightly muddled in an almost comical way.

Privacy is... tricky, very tricky. Freedom and security tend to be inversely related. There is definitely some level of freedom that needs to be given up for the sake of security, the trick is getting the maximum amount of security while give up as few of those freedoms as possible. It's quite difficult to determine where that line is, but I lean towards freedom.

I will admit that I hadn't read the article when I posted my previous comment. Normally, I'm fairly pro gun control (this tends to run against party position) but I tend to flip-flop a fair deal. In general I feel like having a list for the purpose of insuring that everybody has received proper training is a good thing, but absolutely,under no circumstances, should it be made public. My state was considering making it public not too long ago and it was met with lots of resistance. To me it seemed like it was mostly non-gun owners fighting against it, but that's just my opinion with less than zero factual evidence.

I'd also like to make a quick disclaimer that these are my opinions and not necessarily the opinions of my party, as well as a disclaimer that do to exhaustion and slight emotional trauma from personal events in the past hour or so, this might make zero grammatical sense. I may or may not attempt to fix grammar in the morning, I'll see how bad it is then.