I very likely agree with you on every gun ppoint, but i do have a question / counter often raised to me - that i don't have to answer to:
How would tight regulations like that look in a large country already flooded with weapons of all shapes and sizes?
I know multiple pro-gun people who seem to compose a large percentage of their pro-gun belief system around the foundation of the inability to remove them. Ie any bad guy who ever wants a gun will always have it (because there's so many), so give more guns to the good people.
What are your thoughts there? I don't really have a counter.
- Refuse sales of ammunition without proof of gun purchase and registration.
- Refuse gun purchase for specific gun types and if a person already has a certain number of guns.
- Mandate and enforce training before gun purchases, with obligatory re-training every X years. Checked at every purchase of ammo and guns. No training, no sale.
- Mandatory licensing for open carry. Mandatory army-level training for concealed carry. With mandatory re-training.
- Buyback and exchange plans for existing weapons.
- Huge fines (not jail time, fines) for non-compliance. Money is a much bigger deterrent than jail time.
CA has most of these already. They just instituted a requirement for a background check for ammo purchases.
One of the biggest problems is your last point - non-compliance isn’t really enforced. If you ask your friend to buy a gun for you because you’re not eligible, the dealer might stop the transaction, but there is a very low likelihood there will be any police follow up.
It is a federal law and occasionally they prosecute the most egregious examples, but I've heard from many gun dealers that when they suspect a straw purchase and report it, the ATF follows up maybe 1% of the time.
Jeeze, they even went after a former police officer? Not saying former cops should get a pass, but you’d think they’d try and make an example out of someone involved in a criminal operation.
The ATF/DOJ loves to make examples out of people even when the case is pretty weak.
You do all this and then find out that gun violence didn't decrease. Everyone will say it worked, but upon closer inspection it is mostly massaged stats. You'll find things like suicides being counted in the statistics for gun violence.
Then what? Do you think anyone would be willing to roll back something like this?
The first point is the key one, but I’d go further, no ammunition sales without passing the new regulations on gun ownership. You can keep your gun, and any ammo you have now, but no reloads until you’re properly authenticated.
All of that is repugnant to the constitution and our natural rights. It will also do nothing to stop violence.
One comment regarding the term "Buyback", the government never owned them they can not "buy" them back. It is simply a euphemism for confiscation. Moreover, you can go to pretty much any gun shop or pawnshop to sell a gun you do not want.
The bad people only need guns because the good people carry them around? How often does having a gun out and about save lives? Not prevent a robbery but save a life? How many times does it escalate a situation?
A sibling comment has already posted a link to Wikipedia.
I couldn't see it mentioned immediately on Wikipedia and it kind of falls outside of the scope of that article too so I'll mention that in addition to people directly preventing crime by pulling a gun IIRC there also seems to be less attempts at crime in areas were there are lots of legal guns.
I think rayiner hints at/mentions that somewhere above.
I honestly don’t like U.S. gun culture at all, but I grew up across from Michigan in Canada and this argument always seemed true. It’s just such a hard problem because of the huge number of guns plus the number of owners the seem to indicate you’d have to kill them to take their guns. It seems like a blood bath waiting to happen unfortunately. I hope I’m wrong.
How would tight regulations like that look in a large country already flooded with weapons of all shapes and sizes?
I know multiple pro-gun people who seem to compose a large percentage of their pro-gun belief system around the foundation of the inability to remove them. Ie any bad guy who ever wants a gun will always have it (because there's so many), so give more guns to the good people.
What are your thoughts there? I don't really have a counter.