It certainly would not eliminate all violence. That wasn't the case in Australia, and it wouldn't be the case if done here either.
It did significantly reduce the murder rate though. It's still certainly possible to murder people without a gun. It's just harder. Takes more work. You maybe have to ruin your car, or get really close and do physical messy stuff. It did however completely eliminate mass shootings.
No, it didn't. There was a mass shooting that claimed seven lives in 2018 in Australia. That isn't complete elimination.
Also, I should note, I'm not even saying that this is the way to go. I just think there should be a factual discourse on the subject, and that factual discourse shouldn't contain statements such as "see, there are still shootings in cities/states with gun control, so gun control never works", because that is just plain false, for the reasons previously mentioned.
Australia has still had at least one mass shooting since 1996 and still experiences gun violence to this day. There are also several key differences between America and every other place in the world which I'll get to later. (Much later as it turns out.)
Personally I'd like to find a way for both people who like guns to be able to own them, while at the same time reducing the risks to everyone else. The problems are the criminals who use guns, not the stable law abiding gun owners. The problem is that the stable law abiding gun owners and the state laws that support them wind up being the source for the guns that wind up in the hands of criminals. I think focusing on how we can reduce that transfer from legal ownership to criminal posession through sales and theft would be a good start.
Like most things, it's far more complicated than you make it out to be. The primary source for firearms for criminals isn't law abiding citizens. At least, not until you are talking about the second or third hand market in a lot of cases. The gun trace data has a "time to crime" statistic and there is a certain life cycle to firearms ownership.
The primary complaint from gun control advocates is that most guns in the hands of criminals comes from law abiding citizens via straw purchases. This is simply not true according to the gun trace data which is collected from all over the country by the FBI. The gun trace data is clear on what models are most common and many of the common guns found on criminals tend to be weapons that have been out of production for several years. Guns like the Lorcin 9, 25 autos, and various Bryco/Jennings models are rather prevalent. Being that these have been out of production for over a decade, these do not come from straw purchases, crooked dealers or anything of the sort.
In 2020, the State of Texas alone 1,339,362 firearms were sold via FFL dealers using the proper background check systems. However, in the state of Texas the average "Time to Crime" for firearms is 5.77 years. In 2020, there were 3,416 guns that were part of the time to crime statistic for that year meaning there were 3,416 guns that were sold within 2020 that ended up being recovered by law enforcement that were used in criminal activities. The report does not denote a correlation between types of crimes, just confiscations. That's not even 1% of the firearms sold in that same year. So, when you look at the gun trace data reports from the FBI, you can see that the average time to crime in Texas is 5.77 years compared to 7.01 years for the national average.
Even if you want to total the number of firearms recoveries for the state of Texas by law enforcement, the total is 38,394 covering all types but all but about a desk's worth of them are handguns. That's still a small percentage of the total firearms sold in the state in a single year. Only 910 of them were used in homicides. The report further breaks out the recoveries and where they originate from with almost 10,000 under investigation which may not be tied to anything criminal at all. This does include deaths by suicides as law enforcement will confirm ballistics even in cases where the death is on video. (I have stories about that.)
The report breaks these out by cities in which Houston has by far and away the most firearms recoveries. In fact, Houston is the source for the vast majority of them almost totaling more than every other major city in Texas combined. They do not denote in the report whether or not these come from valid US citizens, but Houston has the largest immigrant population, so we could infer that illegals contribute to that figure. I don't have numbers on that, but it would subtract from any figure you could come up with for law abiding citizens being responsible as a source for firearms in firearms related crimes. Recovery stats do not necessarily indicate a Texas sales origin either, but its safe to say that the Time to Crime values represent these.
Let's also not forget the not insignificant 2,000 guns that the ATF trafficked to Mexico and let fall into the hands of cartels. Only about 710 of which have been recovered. These guns are still found in crime scenes on both sides of the border to this day. Furthermore, there are a lot of crooked gun dealers who conveniently "lost guns" or had issues with records, many of which are no longer in business, some have lost their licenses and some are in jail.
What does this data tell us? I suppose it depends on how you look at it. How I see it is that the law abiding citizens aren't really the problem. The laws aren't the problem. If the law abiding citizens were the problem, you'd know it as there more than 393 million firearms estimated to be in the U.S. at this time. Let that sink in. Total deaths from firearms from all sources barely breaks 30,000 most years. I'll concede that 2020 was a record year at 45,000 deaths. 45,000 includes deaths from ALL sources. Suicides, homicides and justified self-defense shootings by civilians and law enforcement agencies are all in that total.
All of that with 393 million guns in our hands. It's not even a fraction of a percentage. It's not law abiding citizens that are largely the problem.
The guns have to come from somewhere, and right now for most shootings in states/cities with decent gun control, those guns are legally purchased in states/cities with lax gun control and carried over the state/city border either by the person who uses them, or by an illegal gun merchant.
Citation needed. You do realize at a Federal level, the requirements to purchase a firearm are basically the same right? If you are restricted from buying a gun in Texas, you cannot do it in Maryland. Furthermore, states will not let you purchase handguns with an out of state driver's license. That's Federal law. Handguns account for the overwhelming majority of firearms recoveries and crime statistics. It's not even close. In Texas alone it was 28,000+ handgun recoveries vs. less than 4,000 for rifles. That 4,000 are guns recovered. This includes weapons under investigation by law enforcement agencies. That doesn't mean 4,000 used in homicides or anything like that.
People aren't buying handguns in Las Vegas and bringing them into California. At least, not in the droves you seem to think they are. There are some that do move around due to face to face private sales which are often unregulated. However, if you ever sell a gun to a felon and the courts can prove you knew they were a felon, you go to jail. It's that simple.
Again, the ATF is cracking down on FFLs. Keep in mind this doesn't mean "illegal gun merchants." These aren't as prevalent as you think. At one time the BATFE would issue an FFL to anyone who paid for one that didn't have a criminal record. These days its much harder and almost impossible to get an FFL unless you have a storefront or are a licensed gunsmith. Dealers are audited every two years or more if they are problematic. Furthermore, firearms manufacturers like HK, SIG Sauer, Colt, FN, CZ, etc. cannot legally sell and ship firearms to anyone without a valid FFL. Doing so gets them fined and people go to prison for that.
It's hard to track down gun trace data by brand. I'm not sure all states do it but the data for it is most interesting as it often shows a disproportionate amount of weapons from companies that have been out of production for years, sometimes decades. This tells us again that its not straw purchases or new guns getting into the hands of criminals.
I found this inside look at the illegal gun trade rather interesting when I saw it.
They talk to criminals who make big business out of buying guns legally (or stealing them) in states with less gun control, and selling them at high markups in states and cities with strict gun control.
I'll have to look at that video later. It's 3:30AM here so I'm not watching that. However, I've seen Netflix's Ghost gun documentary which was largely horseshit. I'm a bit skeptical especially based on your comments which show a clear lack of how the firearms industry and even how firearms laws work.
However, again the gun trace data is what it is as are the time to crime statistics that result from them. I don't think they are buying them legally nearly as often as you think they are. There is a ton of data to breakdown that's provided by the ATF and the FBI. But that data leads me to a vastly different conclusion.
All of that said, many guns are taken from homes where they are not properly secured. Often by relatives / family members that know the guns are there, but are largely forgotten about by the owners most of the time. Many of them are family heir looms or are inherited down the line and taken by other relatives raiding their dead relative's place. My aunt actually raided my grandfather's place which she didn't legally own and did just that as an example. I don't think my father recovered all the guns either, and neither did the police.
Taking this a step further concerning the laws, the laws are fine. The issue is that the systems in place to tie databases together or to share information are woefully inadequate and out of date. I've worked in government IT. I've literally supported and maintained servers responsible for this at the state level. The infrastructure is appalling to say the least. A lot of times laws are passed but there are no provisions for how the law will be enforced if the agency doesn't implement them. Money is often not in the budget to implement these laws either. Infrastructure isn't on the mind of the law makers who have no idea how these things would be implemented on a technical level.
This does lead to some cracks in the system where people can sometimes buy guns who shouldn't be eligible to do so. That being said, I've run the background checks myself and seen people get denied. People that were suspected of committing straw purchases. I've denied sales to people on the basis that they were clearly buying firearms for people who couldn't own one legally. The system works. The laws work. They need to work better. The systems need to be improved and updated.
Guy's like the Sugarland Texas shooter who shot people in a church with an AR-15 weren't supposed to have gun rights but due to a clerical error, he bought his gun "legally." The law abiding citizens are rarely the problem. The data shows that pretty clearly. That's not to say they are a contributing factor, they are. But they aren't the most significant problem.
My point is that there isn't a way to "restrict guns" from criminals by restricting the law abiding citizens for a couple of reasons. 1.) Law abiding citizens are rarely the problem. 2.) Restriction of firearms from the law abiding citizens is largely unconstitutional.
I think you might be able to eliminate some of the illegal gun buys by eliminating face to face transfers. That's certainly a possibility. I haven't seen any clear data on how much of an impact these sales have. Unfortunately, because those sales are unknown in gun traces you only get data points from when an FFL transfer was done. That assumes that the records are even there as the government doesn't keep that data. The local stores do and only have to keep it for a certain amount of time.
However, even if restriction of person to person sales are a big problem restricting those sales has always gone over like a turd in a punch bowl because it works against the very idea behind the second amendment. That is to prevent the government from overreach and being able to identify and remove guns from the hands of law abiding citizens. The 2nd Amendment is there to guard all the rest and anything that goes against that generally gets a hard "no" from the firearms community.
Taking the 2nd Amendment completely out of the equation for a thought experiment for a second: The problem with gun control is that it won't work unless everyone complies. You have 393 million+ firearms in this country. There is absolutely no way to get them all and no way the American population will surrender every gun they have to the government. Gun control may work in countries that never had massive gun ownership in the first place or places where it's not part of their culture. Gun control like that does not work in the U.S. because we are nothing like those countries.
Guns are also part of our culture. Saying that gun control works might even be arguably true in other countries but the US is entirely unique regarding firearms among all the countries in the world. There are 393 million estimated guns here. The actual total is probably well in excess of that. Getting back to the point of the pointless technology this thread is about, smart guns being made law wouldn't change anything. You have 400+ million legacy weapons out there. It might be a cool technology to curb suicides and maybe thefts inside the home, but its not going to work because the legacy weapons we still have.
And that's not getting into the liability during a firefight such a technology creates when it malfunctions and you get shot because your **** gun's DRM isn't behaving.
