Gun Control?

Based on some comments I received from the lovely Coffee Bean and Tom, I decided to reprint something I wrote after the tragic Virginia Tech shootings - on my defunct 'political' website, Editorial Bear.

You can read the original here...

Gun control is fundamentally flawed. Out of the millions of guns floating around America, a significant number (15% apparently) are unregistered and illegal. These are the guns floating around in the hands of criminals. This minority of guns causes the majority of crimes and banning the 85% of registered weapons will do nothing to curb the circulation of illegal firearms.

In fact, statistics show gun control can have a negative impact on crime figures.

• New Jersey adopted what sponsors described as "the most stringent gun law" in the nation in 1966; two years later, the murder rate was up 46 percent and the reported robbery rate had nearly doubled.
  
• In 1968, Hawaii imposed a series of increasingly harsh measures and its murder rate, then a low 2.4 per 100,000 per year, tripled to 7.2 by 1977.
  
• In 1976, Washington, D.C., enacted one of the most restrictive gun control laws in the nation. Since then, the city's murder rate has risen 134 percent while the national murder rate has dropped 2 %.
  
• Over 50% of American households own guns, despite government statistics showing the number is approximately 35%, because guns not listed on any government roll were not counted during the gathering of data. [9]
  
• Evanston, Ill., a Chicago suburb of 75,000 residents, became the largest town to ban handgun ownership in September 1982 but experienced no decline in violent crime.
  
• Among the 15 states with the highest homicide rates, 10 have restrictive or very restrictive gun laws.
  
• 20 percent of U.S. homicides occur in four cities with just 6 percent of the population - New York, Chicago, Detroit and Washington, D.C. - and each has a virtual prohibition on private handguns.[8]
  
• UK banned private ownership of all handguns in 1997. Since 1998 the number of people injured by firearms in England and Wales has more than doubled, despite massive increase in number of police personnel.[9]
  
• Violent crime accelerated in Jamaica after handguns were banned.

The problem is in America itself. Despite a century of advancement, the country is still very much like the Wild West. Guns are everywhere. Effective gun control, like we've got in the UK, would take decades to really work.

Statistics suggest that 9 children under the age of 19 die from gunshots every single day in the United States. If private gun ownership was banned, would that figure be reduced?

But more importantly, would the American right wing be willing to sacrifice the "security" of private gun ownership to prevent these deaths?

In a country in which most states still allow people to carry concealed weapons (at least the cowboys had 'em on show) I think the answer to that question is a resounding no.