Shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas (19 Students, 2 Teachers Dead)

[sundin13]

ConservagameR said:

sundin13 said:

Chicago and Illinois do have somewhat strict gun laws, but they are generally not considered to be abnormally strict or the most strict in the country at this time. However, even if they were it wouldn't be proof that gun laws don't work. It is instead proof that the effects of local gun laws are limited by the fact that guns can readily flow in from other states or counties. 

And that is the reality of Chicago's gun violence problem. The majority of crime guns come from out of state. This is a pattern we often see in areas with strict local gun laws. The guns come from other parts of the country with weaker gun laws. This is why we cannot simply leave firearms laws as a state's rights issue. It needs to be handled consistently across the country in order to have a strong effect on reducing gun violence. This also shows how important the legal market is in feeding the illegal market. 

Even if you were able to get rid of the guns on a federal level, what about all the bad guys in Chicago and everywhere else who were bringing these guns in?

They won't bring them in across the northern border from Canada? They wouldn't try to get them in from Mexico?

Even if you could stop that as well, are they really going to stop killing people just because they don't have guns?

Other countries who've banned guns have growing problems with other weapons now like knives. To the point they require a background check.

Banning one thing after another doesn't seem like the best course of action if the bad guys are just going to find a way around it and continue.

First of all, I'm not advocating getting rid of guns. But beyond that, the USA is the chief supplier of guns across the whole of North America. If we were able to get a handle on our gun problem, it would significantly help both Canada and Mexico deal with their gun problems and reduce the supply to criminals across the continent. 

As for whether killings would decrease, I believe it would reduce a lot of impulsive crime in particular. It is far from uncommon to have a scenario where two guys get into a fight and one ends up pulling out a gun and killing the other. If you take the gun out of those situations, they may throw hands, but the odds of death decreases drastically. While you do see knife crime in other countries like the UK, you also see a drastically lower homicide rate in general. Even then, I would much rather someone come at me with a knife than with a gun (and there are further subdivisions regarding different calibers of ammunition). 

At the end of the day, the US is pretty good evidence by itself that more guns isn't the solution to the crime problem.