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Originally Posted by Bodyhammer86
I don't mean to threadjack here, but last I checked, you can't buy handguns at Wal-mart. Granted, they have hunting rifles and shotguns, but criminals don't use those kind of weapons and they don't get their guns legally anyway, which is why they're criminals and since they don't give two shits what the laws are, they're gonna find a way to obtain those weapons, be it having them smuggled in, having individual pieces of them shipped in, or making them themselves. Besides that, the cities have many other factors that account for high crime, such as high numbers of minorities, gangs, underfunded police forces, and so on.
/end threadjack
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Sorry - I was wrong about the handguns. I stand corrected.
I just love that old "they're gonna get them anyway" argument. Every country in the world where there is free access to guns has a gun crime problem, and every country that makes gun ownership illegal (or heavily restricted) finds that gun crime falls.
In England it was legal to have handguns until the early 20th Century. Once it was outlawed rates of gun crime started to fall. Admittedly recently gun crime has started to rise again, but you know what? Most of the illegal guns in the UK were smuggled in from countries where they were easy to buy (like the US).
I accept the constitutional right to bear arms in case a militia needs to be formed, but you know what? I think that the government could outlaw everything except bolt action 0.303" rifles and make possession of anything else an arrestable offence with a mandatory 10 year sentence.
The 303 rifle was good enough to kill millions in the world wars, and would be quite capable of setting up a militia. The good news is that it would mean that in event of civil insurrection, everyone would have the same ammo, and everyone would need the same spare parts.
Obviously, because it's hard to hide a rifle in your pants pocket, concealed weapons would be harder to use in crime.