Take away gun from people and criminals will still have and use them, allegedly leading to a possibly rise in violent crime and gun deaths. On the bright side, murders of passion (spouse, family, friends) and accidental gun deaths (children, inebriation) would allegedly decrease dramatically enough to make up for it several times over, resulting in a net decrease in dyingness.
My question is: Does it really matter if gun deaths remain at the current level? In the grand scheme of things, they only represent a minuscule fraction of all deaths, do they not?
Have we reached the point of diminishing returns already? The point at which any measure taken to effectively reduce gun deaths is much more expensive than the value of lost lives from a detached governmental perspective?
Murder rates have not decreased in countries which banned guns. If you Google up “murder rate gun ownership”, all but one link you click off of on the first page will go through what all studies there have been and come out negative for a reduction in murder or crime with lower gun ownership.
And you should note that the way Google works is by counting how many times people click on a link and sorting it towards the first page. So either there’s a whole lot of gun nuts on the internet clicking those links, or that’s just the way it is.
There’s an entire industry dedicated to trying to figure out how Google’s ranking algorithm works, and that ain’t one of the factors. Did you maybe mean “how many people link to the page”?
It’s nothing to sneer at, and it is something that can be addressed, but it must be addressed carefully, without infringing upon the Constitution. Of course, that is a matter of debate as well.
The problem, simply put, is this: a tremendous percentage of the US population own guns. The vast majority never fire their weapons in anger. As a result, they are detached from the problem of gun violence and see no need to regulate them. Therefore, any attempts at passing gun control seem to be nothing less than an infringement of their Constitutional rights. Yet in other places guns are a scourge, costing those localities scores of people, most of which represent their future.
There has to be a way out. Having said that, we have yet another problem. The people that pass laws see the way out as wholesale proscription of certain classes of guns. People who are not victims of crime see that as the first step down the road to total proscription, and that is unacceptable. Admittedly I am one of those people, but you know, I’m not unreasonable. There is room for compromise, but it must be genuine compromise, not “this is what you must do, now suck it down and deal with it”.
Laws are very much knee-jerk reactions to problems. Craft a law carefully and ask for input from he people it will affect and I suspect you’ll have better luck in getting it passed, and with much less resistance.