CP3S said:
With the mass number of guns in this country, I don't think they will ever be very hard to find. At least not for a very, very, very long time.
I agree, I don't want to drag this out, so I'm going to focus on this very specific point, specifically the last part.
You are probably right, because guns are such an ingrained part of US culture, even if they were illegal most people would know where to get them if they were intent on it. Marijuana is illegal in Canada but so many people use it--hell, my 60 year old dad uses it--that if you ask your friends, you will be able to buy it in not a very long time, even if your friends are near-seniors like my dear ol' dad. So, banning guns or being tough on guns wouldn't have a serious effect overnight. But, over time, it would diminish. If it was illegal, there would increasingly be a stigma, because it would be less common. The crime rate would probably go down, because there would be less non-gang-related deaths, but for criminals intent on using guns, and ordinary citizens who just really, really want to have one, it wouldn't affect them much at first. But if gun ownership was harder to get around, I feel that 50% of the current gun-owning population wouldn't be bothered to go through with it. Lots of people would buy illegal, but most wouldn't. And, over time, that would diminish the obsession with guns. People just wouldn't see a need for it. It's not like prohibition or other substance laws, because people often "use" (drink) on a daily or regular basis, but most people use their guns fairly rarely (most, remember), and some almost never. So, they would discover that their lives aren't impacted. It's a baby step towards slowly dissolving the national obsession with guns, and even though crime may spike at first due to proliferation of arms dealers, actual violent, gun-related fatalities would slowly diminish over time. It would gradually normalize the United States to the same usage stats as the rest of the world and the same fatality stats that follow. But slowly, over years and years, because there is a lot of work to do.
I think that is the point I am trying to make. Not only would it save immediate lives from non-criminal fatalities, from everything from accidental discharges which cause hundreds of deaths a year to the jealous husband with a revolver in the bedroom closet, it would slowly create a mentality that doesn't value or see the need for guns, the way most the rest of the western world is, which also drives the crime rate down like it does in most other countries. There will always be guns and crime in every society in our lifetime, but since the United States isn't a nation overrun with criminals it is the widespread ownership and fetishization of weaponry that plays a major, if not central, role in the massive, massive disproportiate gun crime there. Other countries have similar population, but no one has anything close to the same numbers of gun owners and gun victims per capita. When you remove the ease of access to guns from the equation, you will still have both, but over time they will diminish. It's easy to say "you don't know that would happen," but it's not like the US is just a little more of a widespread gun ownership society per capita than everyone else--it's more like a marathon sprinter racing against a guy in crutches, they are that far apart from everyone else in the western world (and many in the non-west). It's no surprise that in almost every single country in the west, almost no one owns guns and almost no one ends up on the receiving end of one. I guess that's my point. Maybe I am wrong, it just seems like too big of a fact to ignore.