You cannot possibly believe that you can confiscate all the guns in the US. So what magic wand do you have to make them disappear?
You don't need to confiscate all guns to practically eliminate gun crime. The UK didn't, we just adopted a harm reduction model, gradually controlling and then removing those weapons with the greatest risk for harm and the least legitimate use - handguns and semi-automatic centrefire rifles. It took decades, but it worked.
Start with a serious federal licensing and registration system. Establish a national database with comprehensive ownership records, including private transfers; require firearm manufacturers to submit forensic samples of bullets and casings for all new firearms. Mandate firing pin microstamping. Fix the known shortcomings of the background check system. Close the gun show loophole. Instate the five-day waiting period originally proposed in the Brady Act. Require secure storage of all firearms in an approved gunsafe. Introduce mandatory safety training. Impose considerably harsher punishments for reckless or dangerous use of a licensed firearm.
Once you've got all that in place, then you can start talking about buybacks, amnesties and outright bans, starting with Title II firearms. Mandate a legitimate sporting or professional justification for the purchase or transfer of any firearm. Ban large-capacity magazines, then centerfire handguns, then semi-automatic rimfire handguns, then semi-automatic rifles.
After 30 or 40 years of incremental progress, you end up with a society that has a negligible number of handguns and semi-automatic rifles, while still maintaining the rights of sportsmen and farmers to own shotguns and bolt-action rifles in a properly controlled manner.
You can do it, if you can muster a serious and well-funded opposition to the NRA.
Good luck getting that kind of law passed anywhere outside of NY/CA. Registration = Confiscation is a strongly held belief. See how many New Yorkers registered their AR-15 when the NY SAFE Act was passed in the middle of the night.
> Close the gun show loophole.
There is no loophole. Federally-licensed gun dealers must run background checks no matter where they sell their wares. Private transfers do not require background checks.
> After 30 or 40 years of incremental progress
What you call "progress," I call a city-slicker's fantasy paradise. I grew up in a nanny state (NY) and moved south in my mid-30s. It's refreshing to live in a place where guns are seen as tools and not as evil monsters that charge out of their locked cases and mow down innocent children all on their own without a human pulling the trigger.
The sitting president (regardless of what you or I think of him) was elected on a base that believes in a different idea of progress. I voted for him stricktly because I believed he'd be largely ineffective and that he wouldn't shit all over my gun rights.
Not so long ago, you could have said the same thing about seatbelts or drink-driving or Jim Crow.
There's a clear case to be made that guns should be at least as well regulated as cars. There isn't a national movement arguing that you should be able to drive with no license, no insurance and no tags. In most states, you need a license to cut hair. This is not an unwinnable battle, it's just a battle that nobody is putting enough resources into winning. Liberals may be outraged and dismayed at the rate of gun violence, but they're not taking action.
So I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt because based on what you've posted, that you're not familiar with gun regulation in the U.S because you're from the U.K.
Guns are heavily regulated. You can't walk into a corner store and pick up a handgun. No were never going to allow registration or licensing as a barrier to acquire firearms. That doesn't mean there are no laws in place to prevent unlawful gun possession.
Criminals don't care about laws, it's a fundamental issue that gun control proponents continue to ignore. More gun control only makes life unnecessarily more difficult for law abiding citizens to exercise their rights.
I am well acquainted with US gun laws.
Do you need to apply for a license in advance of buying a gun in a majority of states? No. Do you have to take a test and prove that you are competent before you can own a gun in a majority of states? No. Is there a national registry of all guns with mandatory reporting of all transfers? No. Is there a requirement for third-party liability insurance? No. Is there a federal agency responsible for researching and reducing firearms fatalities? No.
In a majority of states, you can walk into a gun store, show your driving license, wait for the NICS background check and walk out with a gun within a matter of minutes. In a majority of states, you can buy a gun from a private seller with no background check.
Guns are far, far less well-regulated than cars.
> Criminals don't care about laws, it's a fundamental issue that gun control proponents continue to ignore.
The police care about laws, because they can enforce them. Criminals care about laws, because they can be arrested and prosecuted for breaking them.
Firing pin microstamping and pre-sale collection of striation data makes it far harder to commit a crime with a gun and get away with it. Mandatory safe storage makes it far harder for criminals to steal guns and far less likely for children to access them. Improved background checks reduce the availability of guns to known criminals and people with serious mental health problems. Mandatory registration reduces the supply of guns to the black market by creating a paper trail from factory to crime scene.
If you treat gun crime like a public health issue, you can use evidence-based interventions to mitigate risk. Seatbelt laws save lives. Drink-driving laws save lives. Mandatory driver training saves lives. Speed limits save lives. Exactly the same principles apply to gun control. Practically every other developed nation on earth has taken this approach, with great success.
I've evaluated the risks and feel that my family's safety is my responsibility. When seconds count the police is only minutes away - oh and they have no legal obligation to protect you in the USA.
Regardless of how wrong you might think someone is, please don’t follow up “agree to disagree” with an insult. Even if you don’t think your parent deserves better, the HN community as a whole does.
Consider the fact that a majority of Americans believe in the right to gun ownership.
A good response would be to react to overall death statistics and not emotional one-time events. I'm quite confident that across the US, cars have killed more people over the Vegas news cycle.
Yes we should do something, but gun control laws (at least those in this country that we are ALL willing to tolerate) will not yield the outcome you desire.
I realize most of you won’t do this, but go take a firearms class and learn to shoot. It’s a skill worth learning. As a reader of this forum you are likely to enjoy tinkering and building useful, mechanical things. By far the funnest thing I’ve done is build an AR-15 (gasp! Those things are evil!) from parts. Despite the media’s demonization of this non-military non-assault weapon, the AR-15 is a standardized component platform very much like the PC or LEGOs. That isn’t to imply that it’s easy to build one (lots of swearing involved in getting trigger springs and pins lined up in the small spaces, etc.)
We all want to reduce gun violence, but as history in the US has proven, stricter gun control is not the most effective answer IMO.
I'm not sure you could untangle the "mental health" aspect of mass shootings from the politics of it. Some of it is "extroverted suicide" but a lot looks to me like people have been radicalised.
basically a full scale gun grab would result in Civil War 2, the harm far outweighing the benefit
you can't jail us all
Having a firearm in the home makes your family less safe. The potential benefits of protection from violent crime are vastly outweighed by the risks of accidents, suicide and domestic homicide. You might believe otherwise, you might believe that you're different, but the data doesn't lie. The gun that poses the greatest threat to your life is the one you own.
There are many instances where guns saving lives never make it into reports/statistics.
Here are a few that do:
https://bearingarms.com/category/guns-saving-lives/
Imagine this: What if you were told you were no longer allowed to drive or even ride in a car, because the chance of dying in a car accident (in your own car even!) was too great? Wouldn't you say it's up to you to balance the level of risk you're willing to take to engage in the freedom of expeditious travel?
isn't it time you thought of the children?
and as it stands I also believe one should have the right to take one's own life, so I completely discount scare tactics predicated on suicide stats
I've bought one firearm, out of a dozen, from a licensed store. Almost all are private, individual to individual sales or inherited.
If America gets rid of one million guns, that's one million less guns criminals can illegally obtain. This is not an all-or-nothing game. I'm sure even Japan has a few illegal guns hidden somewhere.
Personally, I kinda see the point of having guns if you live in the middle of nowhere eighty miles from the nearest police station. So I'd say, let them keep their guns. No reason to give them more political ammunition.
For the majority of Americans (by population, not area), guns make much less sense. If American cities are infested with shootings, it's not because gun control doesn't work. It's because the American government is bought out by NRA lobbyists so they don't try hard enough.
It has proven be a tough battle for Americans to coerce the government into action. But, hey, nobody said fighting your government would be easy, did they?
Yes you're so right. I mean Chicago is literally a war zone and has some of the strictest gun control laws in the land. Clearly this is the NRA's fault.
What bugs me is that this kind of thinking comes from watching/reading CNN, NYT, WaPo push the anti-gun agenda and people just gobbling it up with no actual experience with gun handling/ownership. In general the state of the news media in this country has reached a new low. I try to watch all the news channels to get a broad set of opinions on things in general. What I get instead is, either the president is brilliant, or the president needs to be institutionalized. Or that guns should be banned outright, or that kids should be taught to shoot before their 1st birthday. There's absolutely no objectivity these days. Maybe it's always been that way but it sure didn't feel like that 25 years ago.
If you mean "bought out" in terms of actually bringing voters to the polls over this issue you'd be right.
Like it or not, people against gun control are more likely to vote on that issue in the US than people for gun control.
The NRA has over 11 million paying members. That's almost 3% of the US population, probably over 10% if you just count adults. That's a powerful voting block.
This is why I voted for Trump. Hillary was guaranteed to shit all over my gun rights. Trump is proving me right - he's been largely ineffective and despite all the bellyaching, isn't really doing much harm (oh boy, I know I'm going to set off a shitstorm now.) But net-neutrality! But LGBT rights! If you look at what he's said and the practical effect of what he's done...it's basically a no-op.
You're wrong.
Furthermore, communities across the US are becoming more locally homogenous. It's not going to be a person here or there you'd have to deal with, it would be entire communities.