RE: Do ( D )s sell more guns than ( R )s?
February 22, 2019 at 7:48 am
(This post was last modified: February 22, 2019 at 8:06 am by The Grand Nudger.)
It's pretty well known that criminals do, in fact, follow the law and even plan their crimes according to it. More broadly, they function in whatever environment (with whatever restrictions) that the law has created.
Criminals are people like the rest of us, not raging anarchists for whom the law is a non-entity who don't take the potential consequences of their own actions, to themselves, into account. They've simply decided to do this one thing, this time, that breaks a specific law. While a law that says "don't shoot people" is certainly being broken when a person shoots someone, the shooter has no power or ability to change the sum of the environment which they committed their crime in. What this suggests is as far from "criminals don't follow the law" rhetoric as can be imagined. It suggests that the best laws, as in most effective regardless of the motivations of an individual, are the ones that criminals have no choice -but- to follow.
This is why we don't see a rash of hand grenade crimes in the US, even though a grenade would be a must-have item on every criminals wishlist if the law were wholly ineffective in the face of their anarcho-criminality. They have to climb mount improbable to get one, and then using it brings consequences they don't want on their heads.
We know for a fact that gun control works, and a more sober assessment than "criminals don't follow the law" is that some of the things we might do and call gun control might not be effective, or work as intended. The thing to do isn't throw our hands in the air and suppose that there's nothing that the law can do, but find which sets of legislation are most effective for a specific goal and replace those ineffective control measures with items in the effective set. For criminals-and-guns that can sometimes mean cracking down on a second party. Most guns in the trace data were purchased illegally. Even if we imagined the ridiculous, that the end user had no regard for law whatsoever, someone in the chain of procurement did and does care. Enforcing straw purchase regs and other transfer related minutia will effect the end user in a manner beyond his ability to control. His decision to use a gun will necessarily play out in an environment where it is harder to procure one, and the procurement incurs a greater cost (both financial and legal).
Criminals are people like the rest of us, not raging anarchists for whom the law is a non-entity who don't take the potential consequences of their own actions, to themselves, into account. They've simply decided to do this one thing, this time, that breaks a specific law. While a law that says "don't shoot people" is certainly being broken when a person shoots someone, the shooter has no power or ability to change the sum of the environment which they committed their crime in. What this suggests is as far from "criminals don't follow the law" rhetoric as can be imagined. It suggests that the best laws, as in most effective regardless of the motivations of an individual, are the ones that criminals have no choice -but- to follow.
This is why we don't see a rash of hand grenade crimes in the US, even though a grenade would be a must-have item on every criminals wishlist if the law were wholly ineffective in the face of their anarcho-criminality. They have to climb mount improbable to get one, and then using it brings consequences they don't want on their heads.
We know for a fact that gun control works, and a more sober assessment than "criminals don't follow the law" is that some of the things we might do and call gun control might not be effective, or work as intended. The thing to do isn't throw our hands in the air and suppose that there's nothing that the law can do, but find which sets of legislation are most effective for a specific goal and replace those ineffective control measures with items in the effective set. For criminals-and-guns that can sometimes mean cracking down on a second party. Most guns in the trace data were purchased illegally. Even if we imagined the ridiculous, that the end user had no regard for law whatsoever, someone in the chain of procurement did and does care. Enforcing straw purchase regs and other transfer related minutia will effect the end user in a manner beyond his ability to control. His decision to use a gun will necessarily play out in an environment where it is harder to procure one, and the procurement incurs a greater cost (both financial and legal).
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