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Originally Posted by camcojb
How does a gun show differ from a transaction anywhere else?
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I just picked that arbitrarily, of course to be effective you have to have oversight over all sales, even between individuals.
The other aspect is somehow improving security of guns which legal owners have, but I don't have a lot of ideas that would be truly effective and not be invasive. The angle there is that a key source of guns for typical criminals would be stolen guns.
Technology exists to all but eliminate that, but it would basically have to be mandated and it isn't practical to apply it to the 300 million guns we already have. You can't fix this thing anytime soon and intense gun rights people basically shoot down any idea that doesn't just solve it immediately.
Mandating something like biometric trigger locks so only authorized people can fire a particular gun would take decades to make a difference and would increase the cost of guns. The first thing alone is enough to make most of you dismiss it, since it won't immediately stop all gun murders, and the second one will have people howling also, even though the 2nd amendment doesn't say guns have to be cheap.
Then of course the fact remains that some criminals would be able to secure ones through some other mechanism (smuggled into the country, etc), so since we can't seal them off completely, we may as well not do anything!
The average felon who has a gun, does not have some sort of international weapon traficker bring them guns in shipping containers. Why do that when you can just buy one from a guy down the street? Would they do that when they couldn't buy from down the street?
The cost of a gun smuggled in is probably a multiple of what it would be from a private seller, and many criminals are not rolling in money, so while it's possible, chances decrease that they could secure a working weapon.
Of course then the argument is the knife attacks in China, wouldn't people just use knives? Of course someone can use a knife but it's a lot harder to kill 20+ people with a knife than it is with an assault weapon.
All of that is not even touching on the violent culture and mental health care issues which gun people point to. I agree completely, those things need to be looked at. The reality is, no one change is going to do it, so you look at each area, and take the low hanging fruit, obvious things and some of these gun things are just obvious.