I agree that restiction only prevents those who would obey the law anyway from obtaining weapons as easily as they could otherwise. I also agree that criminals will use criminal behavior to get ahold of the weapons they want. However, If you life all restriction, you only increase the chance that something like this would have resulted in even larger numbers of dead. What about the person with a conceal permit that panicks and shoots a friend coming around the corner that really posed no threat?
Does that happen a lot? I know a lot of people with CCW permits, and they've never shot anyone. I don't have a problem with getting permits and such, but I think you let people be free and don't punish everyone for the crimes of some.
I really don't think it's laws that are the problem, but the culture and society. Israel, a country where about 10 percent of the people possess permits to carry concealed weapons, has a pretty low murder rate (not counting terrorism here). Switzerland MANDATES a military weapon and ammo in each home, I think--and their murder rate is VERY low. Russia, Brazil--they both have strict gun control laws and yet their murder rates are higher than ours.
Heck, in this country, 100 years or so ago, you could buy a gun anonymously, easily, with far fewer restrictions than today, and the per capita murder rate was about 5 times less back then.
England has harsh gun control laws and their murder rate has gone up while ours has declined.
But here's the part to really think about: do we track how often people use guns in this country for defense? How often having a gun scares away a rapist, or a burgler? Probably hard to impossible to track, but shouldn't we take a stab at it?
When the Brady Act went into effect, 32 states suddenly had waiting periods for buying guns that they didn't have before. One would think that because of that that murder rates in those states went down, right, in comparison to the rates of those states for which the law changed nothing (they already had waiting periods)? But that didn't happen.
According to
The Journal of the American Medical Association, "Our analyses provide no evidence that implementation of the Brady Act was associated with a reduction in homicide rates. . . . We find no differences in homicide or firearm homicide rates to adult victims in the 32 states directly subject to the Brady Act provisions compared with the remaining control states." They did find that some suicides by gun (for men over 55) went down--but the overall rate DIDN'T--those people just used another means to commit suicide.
So other than restricting what law abiding people can do, I don't see how more gun laws would do ANYTHING. And I see no evidence that would help advocate for it other than feelings. I don't think we want to base laws that would take people's rights based on feelings.
