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Originally Posted by molson
That makes sense, but I don't think restrictions on who can buy guns can really put a dent in the number of guns in the United States or damper the gun culture. How many millions of millions own weapons in the U.S. that wouldn't be prevented from doing so even if ownership restrictions based on crimes already committed and mental diagnoses already made could be tightened up? It's still worth doing those things, but that's yet another part of the gun control debate I find disingenuous - Americans pointing to how things are done in Europe but also claiming they don't want an outright ban of guns here. How exactly do we get to those drastically reduced levels of gun ownership without a broader ban that impacts non-felons and non-schizophrenics, etc? What laws get guns away from CU Tiger or all of my neighbors in Idaho? Unless you get guns away from them, we're not becoming Europe when it comes to gun culture. In fact, I think we've seen that the more gun rights are threatened (even just as rhetoric that doesn't go anywhere), the stronger the gun culture becomes. Just the irrational fear that Obama was going to take away their guns caused the best 8 years ever for gun sales. Governments aren't great at regulating culture generally - except when they go full totalitarian.
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How about thinking long term ? Current existing guns 'break' or their owners die or go out of style or whatever. Goal should be changing laws for new purchases and getting programs in place to deal with guns currently owned by people that are somewhat perceptible to the argument, make sure those guns don't end up being sold illegally to nutjobs by putting some sort of buy-back program in place etc.
Of course, for that both parties would have to support it in at least some way.
Just because it's not quick fix and likely won't ever reduce levels to where other western countries, shouldn't mean it is not a worthwhile goal. I mean, it seems pretty clear there is a correlation between the number of guns in existence in a country/state and the number of deaths by gun. So in all likelihood any sort of decent sized reduction (be at 10% or 40%) would result in a somewhat proportional reduction of homicides and suicides. It's simple statistics/propability.
Same as why you put speed limits in place, which you know is still potentially deadly but limits the risk and which one can't actually fully enforce (what percentage of violations get detected ? 1% maybe ?).
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