Whenever this comes up, it’s pointed out that the vast majority of guns in this country are not used in crime - but does the existence of all those legal guns drive the usage of guns in crime?
It feels like an arms race.
In the UK (scary, scary knifecrime island), most people don’t carry weapons, and the police don’t either, so most criminals don’t - they don’t need to, and they’ll just end up with extra convictions for offensive weapons if they do get caught.
In the US, there’s a fairly high chance that when committing crime, you’ll encounter an armed civilian. So it makes sense that criminals carry a gun and are prepared to use it - on top of the police repeatedly demonstrating that they’ll shoot to kill even if you aren’t armed or a criminal.
I don’t know what the solution is - I don’t think the 2nd amendment is needed, I don’t think carrying a gun is needed, but I do think an armed population encourages armed criminals and makes the police extra jumpy. But even if you banned handguns like they did in the UK, you’d face unprecedented resistance, and the sheer number of guns in circulation would make it trivially easy for criminals to continue to get them.
I’m sure @shaddack will be here to point out how easy it is to make your own anyway - but I think if you want less criminals to use guns, you need to give them less incentive to carry them, which means a disarmed population. Which I’m sure won’t be a popular suggestion. Mass buy-back of guns (Which would lead to people making them to hand them in?), amnesty for people to hand in guns?
How do you turn the clock back and put the genie in the bottle? And some people don’t want to (althought I question how realistic this is)
