reply to post by thisguyrighthere
Yeah, the practicality of a gun ban is always the catch, isn't it? To begin with, you have to get millions, if not tens of millions of illegal
weapons off the streets. Good luck. The vast majority of criminals aren't going to turn their weapons in. Next, you have to prevent them from
being imported and while that's not an enormous problem right now, you can bet that if firearms were banned, it would become one, just as the
illegal drug trade has. And finally, as you say, you'd need to erase the knowledge of how to construct a firearm from the public. Its really
not that hard to construct a crude firearm as it is, but you can bet the ones showing up on the streets would become much more sophisticated if a
ban were enacted. In the best case scenario, they'll just switch to another weapon (exhibit A: Great Britain knife crime).
So who does a ban actually affect? We all know the answer to that: the average guy minding his own business. So what's the point, besides making
a few liberals feel morally superior for punishing the common man and giving the politicians a band-aid they can slap on the problem to make everyone
think they're doing something? There really isn't one. It sure as hell isn't crime prevention.
Do you want to solve the violent crime problem in the United States? I'll tell you how. Start throwing violent criminals under the jail. Too
often, they're right back on the streets less than five years after committing their crimes due to prison overcrowding. Why are the prisons
overcrowded? Because we lock up every petty thief and dope smoker in the country. That needs to cease, too, because its just turning otherwise
(mostly) harmless criminals into thugs once they're exposed to prison life. The next thing we need to do is to improve the quality of life in our
inner cities, which is a topic for another discussion and much more difficult in practice.
Finally, as a side note, I'd also like to mention that the US murder rate is roughly half what it was 20 years ago. We've still got a major
problem, but apparently we're doing something right...even with all those nasty, evil gun owners out there.
