That is not how I would frame the question. The question is whether guns are a greater advantage to law-abiding people or greater disadvantage to law abiding people. The actions of criminals should not affect my ability to engage in lawful conduct. One of the main objections that gun rights advocates have is that gun control tends to disproportionatley impact law abiding folks.
I don’t think this is relevant to any particular argument being made, but holsters are pretty common. Quick access safes, hideaways furniture, passive and active security, etc.
Agreed that criminals shouldn’t affect your ability to engage in lawful conduct, but the debate is about what should be lawful conduct. And of course gun control disproportionately affects law-abiding people. If you don’t follow a law, it’s not affecting you until you get caught, is it?
This quotation is why I framed the question as I did. I assumed it would be a matter of determining if the presence of guns is advantageous or not when it comes to reducing crime, homicides and misery. If you’re ideological enough to think gun rights are worth having regardless of how they’re abused, and would prefer the option to own a gun even if that option decreases the safety of you and the people around you, that’s another place our thoughts diverge and I don’t see how it’s possible to find much common ground. It’s just weird to me that guns should be so important that they’re worth all the deaths. I doubt even the First Amendment would be defended so aggressively if people were dying every day as a result of what it permits.
It would have a massive impact on the legal possession of guns and a non-zero impact on gun ownership by criminals (at least in the short term).
I suppse that there would be some effect but youa re really only chipping away at the very edges of the argument. That doesn not make it a poor argument.
The key is that you stated it would have no impact on criminals. That’s a false statement and therefore the argument is poor. I think directionally is correct but a sound argument cannot have false premises.
I’ve stated frequently that a gun ban and confiscation of guns would reduce the flow of guns into crimnal hands, but this reduced flow would take years if not decades or generations to significantly reduce gun ownership among criminals. I’m saying it won’t do a thing about the guns already in criminal hands.
Thats already the case in places like New York or Chicago or DC. And yet it doesn’t seem to act as much of a deterrent in these places (sure there are some limited number of legal gun owners but the number is de minimus).
And how often do you think a law abiding gun owner becomes a criminal? What percentage of the 12,000 gun murders we see every year do you think are committed by previously law abiding gun owners who legally owned their gun?
Police would have to keep assuming that for decades. It would be at least that long before we leeched enough guns out of the system for cops to assume away the threat of armed criminals. This is my point. We would have a period of decades where the average citizen would be unarmed while criminals would have guns. Once again: 100,000+ defensive gun uses per year.
Oh, OK. I overstated things (for the sake of brevity and simplicity) by saying it would have no effect on criminal gun ownership. I should have said it would have almost no immediate effect on criminal gun ownership and it would be years if not decades or generations before we had significant reduction of criminal gun ownership (low enough for cops to go around with peper spray and billy clubs).
I’d like to make my case for licensing and registration one more time.
As has been noted many times, most gun violence is committed by people who are not legally allowed to own guns. Almost all these criminals owned guns were once purchased legally from a gun dealer and somehow find their way into criminal hands.
As noted above, the total ban and confiscation of all guns would severely reduce the flow of legally owned guns into criminal hands. But, it would take many years if not generations to severely reduce the stock of guns in criminal hands even by this draconian (not to mention unconstitutional) method.
Licensing and registration of all guns (but especially handguns) would make it very easy to track who sold a gun to a criminal. Current penalties of up to ten years in prison would soon have a deterrent effect on the transfer of guns to criminals (of course this would not be as effective as not permitting any guns into the system at all but licensing and registration has the benefit of being constitutional) and would also reduce the flow of guns into criminal hands and while this method would also take many years if not generations, we would not be infringing on constitutional rights or leaving people unarmed in the face of a well armed criminal population (see 100,000 dgu/year).
I had proposed a “grand bargain” exchanging licensing and registration for federal pre-emption of all gun state and clocal gun laws and the repeal of many of our current federal gun laws that were either obsolete or ineffective (which would include the vast majority of current federal gun law). Add to that some guarantee of the confidentiality and protection against the improper use of the registry and I would call it a day.
Due process rights and rights against self incrimiantion and all sort of other criminals defendant rights result in the release of criminals that go on to commit crimes (including crimes like rape and murder) on an almost daily basis. Perhaps we shouldn’t be defending these rights so aggressively either.