As far as I am concerned, the advocates of more restrictions on firearms ownership have yet to even acknowledge their burden of proof of the efficacy of their proposals. That is, when we outlaw a previously-legal style of firearm and outlaw previously legal accessories to those firearms like 30 round magazines, what level of NET improvement in the public safety should we expect and at what NET cost?
The horrible Sandy Hook massacre started with the murderer shooting his own mother four times in the head while she lay in bed. So, please don’t insult my intelligence by telling me how the law would have stopped even half of the murders on that sad day. But people who propose laws also expect those laws will be enforced and enforcement costs money. They also expect that the new law will bring some concrete improvement in society.
How much money are we going to divert from, say raiding medical marijuana clinics, to hunting down people with newly-outlawed 30 round magazines? This is not an unimportant because with our trillion dollar deficit we can only allocate so much borrowing to fund new government programs. The Sandy Hook massacre invites, we are told by the media, three “national conversations” that the media like David Gregory hopes to control. Those are on firearms regulations, school safety and treatment the mentally disturbed.
The media and politicians appear to have chosen to hold the conversation on firearms first, so that must be the most important one. But when we start to deal with school safety and mental health, those items will eventually have budget impact as surely as night follows day. If we pass changes to firearms law that must of necessity divert expensive law enforcement resources, how much of our borrowing capacity will remain to fund improvements in school safety or mental health services?
And if, based on history documented below, that few of the estimated 100 million magazines in private hands are destroyed or turned in, what level of real public safety improvment are we to get for the money we must spend to enforce the law? Is this a fool errand, or are politicians just pandering to people who see and end to the failed war on drugs and are looking to fund a new (equally fruitless) war on something else? I am beginning to think the latter is sadly true, at least in part.
from:
Gun Restrictions Have Always Bred Defiance, Black Markets
For reasons of their own, most people, in many countries, defy anti-gun laws
J.D. Tuccille | December 22, 2012
In a white paper on the results of gun control efforts around the world, Gun Control and the Reduction of the Number of Arms, Franz Csaszar, a professor of criminology at the University of Vienna, Austria, wrote, “non-compliance with harsher gun laws is a common event.” Dr. Csaszar estimates compliance with Australia’s 1996 ban on self-loading rifles and pump-action shotguns at 20 percent.
...
Csaszar points out that, after Austria prohibited pump-action shotguns in 1995, only 10,557 of the estimated 60,000 such guns in private hands were surrendered or registered.
And when Germany imposed gun registration in 1972, he says, owners complied by filing the appropriate paperwork on 3.2 million firearms. This was a bit awkward, since estimates of civilian stocks were in the 17-20 million range...
...
The high water mark of American compliance with gun control laws may have come with Illinois’s handgun registration law in the 1970s. About 25 percent of handgun owners actually complied, according to Don B.
Kates, a criminologist and civil liberties attorney, writing in the December 1977 issue of Inquiry. After that, about 10 percent of “assault weapon” owners obeyed California’s registration law, says David B. Kopel, research director for Colorado’s Independence Institute, a free-market think-tank, and author of The Samurai, The Mountie, and The Cowboy, a book-length comparison of international firearms policies.
That one-in-10 estimate may have been generous. As the registration period came to a close in 1990, The New
York Times reported “only about 7,000 weapons of an estimated 300,000 in private hands in the state have been registered.”..
article link:
http://reason.com/archives/2012/12/22/gun-restrictions-have-always-bred-defian
bkmk
Bookmarking.
The author is correct.
The liberals are too afraid to touch this radioactive issue.
I wish they would persue gun control. This would change the political landscape.
Look at the massive growth of the NRA the very day the tragedy occurred, gun owners knew they would be blamed for a crime they did not commit.
Also somthing is happening that has never occured before.
Gun stores are soldout in ammo and guns.
Factories are ruuning full blast and shelves are still empty.
This will be like pot. Some states will be anti-gun and some states will be pro-gun. And the por-gun states will be left alone by the Feds, because they can’t enforce their silliness at the local level without state cooperation.
I hate these liberals who say “Private citizens shouldn’t own the same weapons as the military.” The military is the government. And the 2nd amendment was written to keep the citizens armed AGAINST the government.
They will go after bullets and magazines. Better buy plenty of both now before they go for them. The 2d Amd does not say a right to bear bullets they will say, thus outlaw all bullets. That is where they will go if they cannot get the guns. I am planning to visit my fav gun shop this week and fill his pockets with bucks for bullets.
Gun banners, you lost the President, the senators, the social media, and now you’ve lost liberal LA mommies. You’ve lost everything. Again.
We need to work to make sure he's right.
Well, it’s nice to read a feel-good, optimistic article now and again. I think it is mostly wishful thinking though. The left has the momentum on gun control at the moment. Remember that the demographics of this country are different now. We have a lot more Hispanics that don’t understand why a big, intrusive government is not a good idea. You’d think they’d look at the countries they came from and realize how bad socialism is, but these are basically the same people that kept a failed socialist government in power in Mexico for 70 years. The problem with what currently passes as the American public is that they see no connection between their votes and bad governance and policy.