I know very few people that have "a handgun." Some - my dad (and it was his dad's before him) - but very few. Most people I know who own guns have a LOT. A dozen or two dozen. Easy to see how 100m people own 350m guns.
Printable View
I know very few people that have "a handgun." Some - my dad (and it was his dad's before him) - but very few. Most people I know who own guns have a LOT. A dozen or two dozen. Easy to see how 100m people own 350m guns.
I pretty much agree with TSG, except I do like me some guns.
In spite of that, I'll go out and say that our murder rate wouldn't be so high if there weren't so many guns in this country. Guns are the most effective, portable, readily accessible devices you can use for killing. The UK has a much higher reported violent crime rate than the US, but the murder rate is much, much lower. It's a lot more difficult to stab or beat somebody to death.
If we were going to do something about the availability/types of guns in this country, that time was probably a century ago. Right now, there are way too many to confiscate, and as TSG said, the people who would turn them in aren't the people you have to worry about.
I'll also add that for all the press that mass shootings get, they're fairly insignificant in terms of total numbers of firearms-related homicides. The black market created by drug prohibition is responsible for many, many more homicides. Ending drug prohibition would probably be the most effective crime reduction policy change ever.
To solve the problem you'd have to round them all up and destroy them. Not going to happen here like it did in OZ, because:
A) We have some measure of protection of the ownership rights codified in a legal document that is so difficult to change, it's only happened twenty-odd times in over 200 years, and...
B) We have other countries on our continent, most of which have greater written restrictions on gun ownership, but frequently poor institutional control in general. So it gets back to the problem tsg mentioned - they'll get in through other means, just like drugs do.
I'm also going to state something logically true but somewhat cold-hearted - unless you live in certain disadvantaged communities, your likelihood of being a victim of random gun violence is still pretty tiny. It's just not a factor of daily life for a large swath of the American public. Additionally, those disadvantaged groups (such as black Americans) feel - quite justifiably - that the police with their guns pose a greater threat to their well being than other citizens with guns.
Even if you are 100 times more likely to be a victim of mass murder by gun in the U.S., 100 times "basically never" is still fucking unlikely.
They say "no other advanced nation has events like this," but no other advanced nation has this many people spread over this kind of area.
Justifiably? Not really, even in Chicago, police shoot around 40-60 people per year, 10-15 of them fatally. They're around 30 times more likely to be killed by another black person, and if they don't get locked up on a regular basis, the odds of getting killed by the police here are negligible.
I don't think the suggestion was necessarily being shot by the police, but more the fear of being shot by police. When daily life includes getting hassled by the man you start to develop distrust. If you distrust the people who are there to protect you, you'll take protection into your own hands. And then you have a bunch of fearful people running around with guns acting irresponsibly. That's a whole socio-economic-racial thing, though, not really gun control.
Summary: Good luck collecting 350m guns and then preventing more from being made/imported/sold. Good. Luck.
"Power is a curious thing... Three great men, a king, a priest, and a rich man. Between them stands a common sellsword. Each great man bids the sellsword kill the other two. Who lives, who dies? ... Power resides where men believe it resides; it's a trick, a shadow on the wall, and a very small man can cast a very large shadow." -- Varys