Which of these alleged causes has disappeared or decreased, causing gun crime to be reduced by half over the past 20 years?
Gun control proponents act as if the past 20 years of increasing gun ownership and liberalization of gun laws while crime steadily dropped hasn’t definitively proven them wrong.
I’m not saying that more guns and fewer restrictions on them makes people safer, but it pretty clearly doesn’t put us in any more danger.
There may be other reasons for the drastic decline in violent crime in the USA … to wit The Master’s article “Does no more lead in gasoline = less violent crime?”
So when does the Brady Campaign change their name to “The Brady Campaign to Prevent Leaded Gasoline”?
I did say a long time.
Also, the second untagged ammo becomes illegal to manufacture, the stockpile that currently exists will begin to deplete. Over time untagged ammo will become more and more expensive due to scarcity. And yeah, maybe 25 years from now you can still by pre-tagged ammo, but it will cost a ton.
Reread what I and PK said. He claimed that there were dozens of major gun control laws over the last 80 years that have done nothing. I asked for a cite that those dozens of laws have done nothing.
Giving me specific examples that include laws for particular cities doesn’t even come close to substantiating PK’s claim.
Yes. It wont prevent any crime. Ammo can be stolen or reloaded.
To be fair, they are trying to reduce the amount of lead in the air.
Pretty much seals the deal.
That is a hugely weak argument. Reloading bullets is a way, way fringe activity. Most people simply won’t. And if the tags (assuming they are possible) would probably be added to the powder, and even fewer people are going to formulate their own.
You are taking the fact that some crimes won’t be prevented, and somehow conflating it in your mind that no crimes will be prevented.
Why do we collect fingerprints? By your logic they would* stop no crime*, because people will wear gloves.
But people aren’t master criminals. They commit crimes because they are stupid and impulsive. And those folks aren’t going to be proactive enough to mail order some pre-tagged bullets from the intarwebs before their crime spree.
I’m not saying tags are possible, I don’t know that they are. But aside from the fact that it’s a hypothetical, that was from 1998. I imagine materials science and manufacturing have advanced slightly since the time period when AOL was distributed on floppy disks.
I wouldn’t go as far as to say it’s uninfringeable. But I do feel that the explicit right to keep and bear a firearm implies a right to use a firearm, at least in some circumstances. So if some law attempted to make it universally illegal to shoot a gun, I’d say that law was unconstitutional.
Perhaps technology has changed to make it feasible - do you think it has? I see no evidence that this is the case.
So even ignoring the political reality, the benefits are limited, the costs are high, and the technology doesn’t exist. But aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?
I don’t have any particular expertise in tagging technologies, but smokeless powder burns at thousands of degrees (F) and there’s a severe spike in pressure (tens of thousands of PSI) as the bullet is fired. I’d imagine it would be a significant technical challenge to devise something that would survive that extreme an environment and not interfere with the normal functioning of a firearm.
That’s one of the issues related to cost that I didn’t mention. Ballistic science would have to accommodate for changes in the formulation of the taggant adding process. Ammunition manufacturers would incur cost to update their manufacturing process, reloaders their specs, etc. Really a description of some of the multitude of challenges were described in the NAS study.
I just said I don’t know that it is feasible. If it were, it would obviously be beneficial.
Political reality shifts.
I’d say that being able to swab up tags from crime scenes and tell you who purchased the bullets is as close to a miracle as one might hope for in the near future.
Are they? I’d like to see a cite that the costs are high. And how high is too high? If it doubles the cost of bullets, but drops handgun crime by 20%, is that worth it?
But can it exist? And at what cost? You are declaring it a useless failure, when it would obviously be useful. Aside from those points, how did you like the play, Mrs. Lincoln?"
They already exist in high explosives, so I assume surviving the firing wouldn’t be an issue, but yeah, obviously if they can’t exist without degrading bullets, that would be a prohibitive issue. I’m not familiar with loading bullets, but since people can alter the loads of specific rounds, I assume that it would be possible to add additional powder to compensate for the inert mass of the taggants, right?
The OP posited to ignore any political implications.
That would be cool - like magic. Do you think that most crime scenes where gun shots are involved have unknown shooters? What do you think the population of potential benefit here is?
There are cost estimates for some of the known items in the cite I linked. Post #37, table 3.2 of the NAS report. There are also currently unknown costs for things like data gathering, etc. There is no cite for those because there is nothing that exists. If it doubles the cost of bullets but handgun crime drops 20%, I’d say maybe. To determine that, we’d have to evaluate what else can be done that would yield drops of 20% in handgun crime. Perhaps it can be done much cheaper. Would 20% be worth it to you? When do you think it’s not worth it?
Right now (as of the date of the NAS report) it does not exist. Could it? Theoretically it could, just like the molecules in my hand can possibly align to allow me to pass through a table unimpeded. Is that likely - probably less than an effective taggant system. But both are possible.
I took your post as saying it was politically impossible, I was responding to that. If you were just reiterating the OP’s framing, my bad.
I am unaware. But, for instance, if I were going to kill the guy sleeping with my cat, and I knew that I had tagged bullets, I would pause.
Yes, we’d need to know the numbers, but most violent crime is impulsive crime, so I think, at the least, a lot of people would be caught a bit quicker.
Which, being nearly 20 years old, isn’t really very reputable. The technologies involved have improved markedly over those years. I’d like to see some modern assessments before dismissing it out of hand.
Yes, but there could be reasonable projections. Certainly there would be savings in policing costs. If the CSI bro can just take swabs, and plug the serial numbers into a national database, that’s likely cheaper than paying a detective to make a bunch of calls and question people.
Personally, I’d say if it doubles the cost of bullets, a 1% decrease in violent crime (that can be definitively traced to it) is reasonable. But I can afford bullets at twice the cost, and some people can’t, so I see that being a real issue. Certainly the cost will go down over time as technology improves, but the point where it’s politically feasible, I have no idea.
I’m glad that you’re willing to throw a probably in there. 
More like 1000x the cost and no significant decrease.
But the 1000X the cost is the goal, not the benefit to law Enforcement.
That’s utter nonsense.