The 10 gun questions my daughter in law asked me last week

Start with YES IT IS for safety's sake! The 4 rules of gun safety say to treat every gun as a loaded gun:

The Rules:

- All guns are always loaded

- Never point any gun at anything you don’t wish to destroy

- Keep you finger off the trigger until ready to fire the gun

- Know your target and what is beyond it

2.    Will it go off if I touch it?

That depends on where and how you touch it I guess.

People that don’t know better, especially on TV shows, always seem to pick up guns with their finger in the trigger guard.  In the real world that’s a great way to shoot out a window or worse … and that’s if you’re lucky.

The first thing you always do when picking up any gun is point it in a safe direction, check and clear it yourself to be sure there are no rounds in the cylinder, for a revolver. Don’t trust anyone telling you it’s empty. In the case of a semi-automatic pistol take out the magazine and visually check the chamber.  Just removing the magazine does not make a gun safe of there is a round still in the chamber. 

There’s a classic YouTube video out there of a "well trained" DEA cop lecturing children in a classroom about how he’s “the only person there trained to be safe with a gun”.  He then proceeds to shoot himself in the leg with his service issue Glock because he didn’t follow rule #1.  He removed the magazine but didn’t clear the chamber visually.

3.    Is that registered/legal?

Very few places require “registration”.  New York, LA, San Francisco etc. are about the only places where you have to register a gun.  Owning a firearm is an individual civil right, in spite of what some folks have tried to say.  With the Heller and McDonald decisions, the US Supreme Court has made it clear that it’s an individual right, subject like others to reasonable restrictions. National registration isn’t one of those acceptable restrictions and is prohibited by law.

The “legality” of a gun, beyond the restrictions of the 1934 National Firearms Act (NFA), has more to do with who holds the gun than the gun itself.  Pretty much anything not a machine gun (multiple shots with a single trigger pull), under .50 caliber and with a barrel longer than 16 inches for a rifle is a “legal gun”.  That being said, there are people that can not own or buy a gun or ammunition including convicted felons, those adjudicated mentally unstable or committed involuntarily, people under age restrictions, usually 21 for a handgun and 18 for a shotgun or rifle.