Why?
And the argument of "it's too hard because of the volume already sold" doesn't wash.
In the UK, guns are heavily restricted and we definitely have criminals but our gun crime is very low. There must be some reason these criminals are not using guns?
I'd wager that it's because most people do not have guns, so they're harder to access, less chance of criminals being able to access. Wouldn't that be the same in the US too?
US already has a lot of weapons, and getting them illegaly is a lot easier, than in UK, where they literally have to smuggle them from abroad, and being an island makes it even harder.
I live in the balkans, and getting a gun here is very hard, almost impossible. People still get shot, and during the "wild 90s" here, there were a lot of shootings, even mass ones (not during the war, but after, or in in-war areas).
The only difference is, that we have "different criminals" here, so when someone gets shot, both the shooter and the shot person usually know why they're shooting and why they're being shot, and it's rarely without a good reason.
But as far as I know, now it is also pretty much illegal to carry a knive around in the UK, as the crime with knives were and are very high (but still lower than the US).
But in general I do not agree to the idea to reduce the problem to the number of guns. Germany for example has a quite high number of guns per capita (higher than one would expect) and so has switzerland, but both have lower homicide rates than the UK.
I would rather focus on the reasons, why someone goes homicidal.
The point is to frustrate those efforts.
> I’d imagine it’s pretty easy to find some online from overseas.
Good! Now you've added new points of failure. It would just be terrible if that high-capacity magazine they bought from a sketchy vendor were to jam in the field.
> criminals can steal them from legitimate places.
...which increases the risk of getting caught before anything worse happens.
If you look at photos of confiscated guns in California, very few have 10 round magazines. Scrolling through SFPD's twitter, I can only find photos of illegal guns with illegal magazines.[1][2][3] The second photo is of a Polymer80, which is a pistol you can make at home using a dremel and a hand drill. They're compatible with Glock parts and quite reliable.
These laws do nothing to reduce violent crime. The main effect is to annoy law-abiding gun owners. When I moved out of California, it took me maybe 30 minutes to undo all the CA-specific modifications on my guns.
1. https://twitter.com/SFPD/status/1511846273644589058
A school-age kid very likely not.
Gun control isn't supposed to stop all criminals from getting guns, if there's a will, there's a way.
As Jim Jefferies puts pretty well: there's almost no reason to own a gun if you aren't a hunter except for that you like guns. That is ok on a personal freedom level but has pretty harsh consequences to a society when at scale...
There are (conservatively) hundreds of thousands of defensive gun uses per year in the United States, and evidence to suggest this actually lowers the rates of various types of violent crimes (including "hot robberies", where the home owner is still in the house when it is being burglarized).
The right to self-defense is a foundational human right, and logically entailed from that is the right to effective means of self-defense.
I really wish people would stop repeating this falsehood. If you live in a state that allows private sales without a background check, and you sell a gun to a non-resident of that state, you have committed a felony. Non-resident sales must go through an FFL, which means background checks and whatnot.
Most criminals get their guns through theft, self-manufacture, or straw purchases (often via a spouse or close relative). They're not acquiring them through legal loopholes.
Not to mention making these kind of things makes the criminals that are doing this stand out, and that is something they generally want to avoid.
And does the requirement to steal/import/manufacture/buy on the black market make it easier to buy on impulse, or harder?
Both are used in gang warfare and assassinations.
I doubt they would. (If they make sense to have in a world with 20 round magazines, they make exactly as much sense in a world with 10 round magazines and a fantasy that no 20, 30, or 50 round magazines remain.)
Because we tried it for a decade and it did various shades of nothing.
IMO a lot of them just wants the "real thing" and not necessarily wanting a lethal instrument, so leading majority to non-firing/less lethal subgenres makes sense. They don't need a real working three-stamp Stormtrooper AR9 for 9mm Monday, but that's just my opinion.
