Quote:
Originally Posted by Freebase Dali
I do not, however, think that banning guns across the board is going to be effective in the U.S. Not only are there far too many of them, it simply creates a black(er) market for them and shifts the availability to criminals who simply don't follow laws, and disarms those that do.
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I don't really disagree, though I think that it is really impossible to say for sure exactly what would happen. The interesting thing about it all is that most of the guns on the black market are manufactured in the US and introduced into the population through the legal gun market. The saturation of guns in the US and the apparent ease of access to them is so prevalent that cartels have been smuggling US manufactured guns across the boarder into Mexico and South America in bulk for years. I can imagine that were these guns to be made illegal, you could easily expect to see these stockpiles of weapons come back to haunt us by returning home to fuel the new black gun market.
But to me, while this might make the prospect of eliminating guns not feasible, this dilemma more than anything else demonstrates that we need to be more cautious. I don't think we should ban guns across the board, but we need to regulate the market better so that it's not as easy for the weapons to slip from the legal market into the black market. I can't think of any reason why the govt couldn't do a better job at tracking gun ownership other than the fact that the NRA furiously lobbies against any prospect of such a system.