TheRiov wrote:
Ok, I'm not going to get into the right/wrong arguments about gun control. I am however going to cry foul at at least one of the arguments made here.
If guns were to be illegal, then it WOULD yield a net reduction in the existence of guns on the street or in possession of criminals. Anyone publicly posessing a gun, stopped for a traffic stop, or searched for any reason would have the weapons confiscated and not returned. Even if no conviction was obtained for say...drug charges, the weapons would be removed. Many criminals obtain their weapons from the same places as law abiding citizens or from gun shows, or by purchase from other 'legitimate' sources. if those sources dry up, then the only source of new weapons entering the system is smuggling.
Now I'm NOT advocating for making firearms illegal. I'm just stating that claims that making firearms illegal wouldn't take them out of criminals are fairly silly.
The evidence has repeatedly indicated that it is NOT harder for criminals to get guns if you make them illegal. Look at the armaments of drug cartels in Mexico.
People like to object to this with "but they get them from the U.S.!" Well, some they do, but the argument is sort of cheating. Underlying this is "if we made guns illegal
everywhere it would work, and the problem with that is that we don't control "everywhere". Large portions of the world have no realistic hope of enacting gun control, because the government that would enact it is hideously incapable of enforcing it, or any other law, effectively.
There's also the problem that it misses the point. Again, gun control is mainly a solution looking for a problem. The problem is "violent crime"; focusing on "gun control" or "criminals that have guns" is essentially just focusing on one arbitrarily selected part of the larger societal issue of violent crime simply because it involves guns. People like to focus on the gun as providing a means to commit opportunity crimes, but this is usually done by people who are ignorant of firearms and vastly overestimate their effectiveness compared to a knife. This is entertaining because they inevitably start noticing the weaknesses of firearms as soon as the issue of self-defense comes up. Those who do know something about firearms tend to be law enforcement and military personnel that have an inflated sense of their own expertise with weapons, and an unreasonable estimation both of the level of training needed to handle a weapon safely, and of the average level of civilian ability.