Author: Mikey <[email protected]>     Reply to Message
Date: 12/5/2015 6:05:14 PM
Subject: RE: So..... We're not going to talk about it?

drak: we live in a world where you can print a gun off the internet. within the next 15 years it will be dramatically, hugely easier to get a gun than it will be to get illegal drugs. Everything you know about the prevention of software piracy and other prohibited goods tells you that preventing people from distributing the designs will be impossible.

Further, lets even assume that you could in fact reduce the number from 300 to 600. And lets ignore the fact that mere gun ownership rates do not correlate with gun crime, lets assume they do for the sake of your argument.

Which portion of the population do you think will see reduced access? Obviously people like you and me will not own guns if they're illegal, of course. But it is irrelevant if you and I own guns, because we aren't murderers.

If the argument was that the people who commit mass murder are regular people like you and me, who are just average law abiding citizens until one day - out of the blue we SNAP and go on a killing spree...then I could at least see your point.

But rampage killers do not just snap. They plan ahead, they prepare themselves, and there is nothing that you, or I, or anyone but the most totalitarian government imaginable can do to prevent us from obtaining a firearm in those circumstances. No mere law will dissuade these people. To claim that gun control will be effective in this circumstance is not to say that you will reduce guns from 600M to 300M, but to say that you will reduce their availability to near-zero. What does it matter if the gun costs 10x as much on a black market??? These people don't care. They're not price sensitive. Their demands for guns is highly elastic.

These laws do not disarm criminals. Criminals who will murder people do not obey these laws. To think that they will not only requires a complete disregard for the empirical evidence of history, but also a lazy reasoning that overlooks key factors in these crimes.

And thats even overlooking 3d printer technology. The government can't keep drugs out of prison - an environment in which there is maximum, totalitarian control. What makes you think that they can prevent a thinking, planning mass-murderer from obtaining a weapon in a free society? It is flat-out impossible.

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