Bang Bang

Happiness is a warm gun
( bang bang shoot shoot )
Happiness is a warm gun, yes it is
(bang bang shoot shoot)

The big issue of the moment is gun control. We've been through this many times in my lifetime. The issue jumps to the forefront after each major incident in which guns are used.  Changes are made to laws, some permanent, some temporary. None of which seem to prevent the next tragedy. For instance, there was a ban on  "assault weapons" as well as high capacity magazines when the two wacky students committed their own particular atrocity.  They used the following weapons:

Intratec TEC-DC9
Hi-Point 995 Carbine
Savage 67H pump-action shotgun
Stevens 311D double barreled sawed-off shotgun
99 explosives
4 knives

I think none of these was obtained legally. Many existing laws were broken during the period in which Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris collected their weapons.

The lesson that should have been learned was that laws do not prevent such tragedies. They cannot.  Criminals do not obey laws... that's one of the reasons why they are called criminals.

There are over 270 million guns (per the website gunpolicy.org, an international gun policy group) owned by civilians in the U.S., presumably legally. It is a rare criminal who buys a gun legally. Most often, he purchases an illegally obtained gun from someone not licensed to sell it and who does not conduct even a cursory background check.

Only law-abiding people purchase their guns from licensed dealers and only law-abiding people go through background checks.

We lack a lot of facts that we need in order to have a reasonable discussion of the problem and we aren't going to get those facts from either the pro-gun or anti-gun crowd.

In my not so humble opinion, only confiscating all civilian owned guns will have a long term affect on gun crimes. And I do not believe such a thing would be tolerated in this country. First, it would require the repeal of the Second Amendment. Second, it would require the cooperation of all current gun owners. It would have little effect in the short term because the criminals would not obey any confiscation law. It might result in an increase in gun crime as criminals take advantage of an unarmed society. It might induce some law-abiding citizens to become criminals also in order to keep their weapons. In the long term, however, it would eventually remove all existing guns from society. A situation which would likely lead to a black market in guns and the illegal importation of them. In the end, there would still be guns in the hands of those we intended to disarm.

And then there's the issue of do we continue to arm the police or do we disarm the beat cop?

I suspect that this almost frenzied effort to control guns will fail.