Smart guns aren't going to hinder anyone but responsible people.
We need a few things:
1) Funding alternatives to incarceration. People that go to jail tend to have a frequent flyer card.
2) Law enforcement sharing of critical data on offenders.
3) Funding treatment and therapy programs for drug abusers (ABUSERS, key word. I know this isn't a popular opinion on HN, but ABUSE and USE are two different things)
4) Finally, we need to wake up and realize there ARE bad people in the world, and unless you live in a small community, you can't have 100% safety. You can react by protecting yourself (yes, carry concealed), or if you're not comfortable with that, take a professional classes on how to survive extreme situations. Your safety at the end of the day is your responsibility ultimately.
I've always thought that the arguments from the anti-gun crowd defied all logic. If access to guns was the root of the problem, then gun violence should be going down, rather than up. Far fewer people own guns now than did, say 150 or 200 years ago (when it was probably close to 100%). Solving the problem by focusing on guns is trying to treat the symptom rather than the disease.
I don't think you're right about how pervasive gun ownership was, due to changes in costs and wealth, and the ability to maintain guns in the days of corrosive black gunpowder and corrosive percussion caps and primers (the WWII M1 Carbine was the first US weapon system to use non-corrosive primers). And of course blacks were largely disarmed post-Reconstruction, next up were post-Civil War immigrants starting around the last turn of the century, etc. See also Chicago post-McDonald and the nationwide sweep of shall issue laws has radically increased the utility of owning a handgun, now 43 states and ~72-3% of the population.
We need a few things:
1) Funding alternatives to incarceration. People that go to jail tend to have a frequent flyer card.
2) Law enforcement sharing of critical data on offenders.
3) Funding treatment and therapy programs for drug abusers (ABUSERS, key word. I know this isn't a popular opinion on HN, but ABUSE and USE are two different things)
4) Finally, we need to wake up and realize there ARE bad people in the world, and unless you live in a small community, you can't have 100% safety. You can react by protecting yourself (yes, carry concealed), or if you're not comfortable with that, take a professional classes on how to survive extreme situations. Your safety at the end of the day is your responsibility ultimately.