One thing that really irritates me about the anti-gun-control crowd is that idea, "if you ban guns, criminals will ignore the ban, because they are criminals and criminals ignore laws."

People who break one law will still obey countless others. It's also totally reasonable to think that someone who engaged in some kind of petty larceny would readily obey gun-restriction laws--why wouldn't they?

This whole "gun control won't work because criminals ignore laws" thing always struck me as a nasty piece of nonsequitor logic and identity politics, a way to "other" a group of people (i.e. more people who live in some counterculture way than people who have actually broken some law) as wild or deranged Hollywood-esque marauders, or a way to invent a bogeyman threat that only guns (in the hands of the so-called "good guys") can stop.

Someone only interested in petty larceny isn't carrying a gun right now for two reasons. They could pawn it for money and if they get caught it will add far more years to their sentence than petty larceny.

Someone who uses a gun illegally today, will use one when they're illegal. At best making guns illegal would stop some domestic murders, but that would have to be weighed against a massive number of people going to jail for not obeying, country wide stop and frisk, and New Orleans style door to door SWAT raids to confiscate.

"but that would have to be weighed against a massive number of people going to jail for not obeying"

Did that happen to Australia? I see no evidence for it.

If not, why don't we use the same mandatory buy-back approach that Australia did?

Australia pulled about 200K guns out of circulation. I live in a small county in a small state and there are likely that many guns just in my county. There are an estimated 300,000,000 guns in the US. And there are already and estimated 200,000 people in NY living in felony violation of the new gun laws against rifle magazines.

Also if you look at the gun murder trend line in Australia it doesn't appear to change after the gun confiscation. Gun murders were on the decline and continued on the same pace.

I am not addressing the possible benefits of stricter gun control laws in the US. I am saying that your claim that Australia-style gun control laws will lead to 'New Orleans style door to door SWAT raids to confiscate' is hyperbolic, such that people may immediately discard your viewpoints as being unrealistic.

I don't know where you got your 200K number. http://edition.cnn.com/2012/12/16/opinion/australia-gun-laws... says:

> In two nationwide, federally funded gun buybacks, plus large-scale voluntary surrenders and state gun amnesties both before and after Port Arthur, Australia collected and destroyed more than a million firearms, perhaps one-third of the national stock. No other nation had attempted anything on this scale.

I confirmed this at http://loc.gov/law/help/firearms-control/australia.php , which says the 1996 buyback collected "More than 640,000 prohibited firearms", and "there were about 3.25 million guns in Australia prior to the 1996–1997 buyback program". The 2003 buyback "resulted in about 70,000 handguns" being collected. I don't know where the CNN' "more than a million firearms" comes from, but the numbers I found are still 3x what you give.

It's also mostly meaningless to compare Australia's "200K guns out of circulation" to a total US ownership of 300M guns. Those are two different statistics. It's more appropriate to compare the 3 million guns from a then-population of 18 million, to the US ownership; Australia had about 1/6th the per capita gun numbers than the US currently has.

Looks like the 200K number is from just part of the buyback. That was from memory in an article I read. But either way, 650k to 1 million doesn't change the point much.

As for door to door raids and stop and frisk, that's the only way to get guns out of american hands. How do we know this? Because many cities and states have had draconian gun laws in the past. There have been buy back programs by the dozens. None of them worked. Just life France and much of Europe, guns are easy to get in restricted jurisdictions.

And why would you think telling people they have to turn in their guns will work? They won't even register them when required by law.

http://www.newsmax.com/US/new-york-gun-registration-law/2015...

I did not say that a buyback program was the solution. (Nor did Australia limit themselves to a buyback program; it was part of a national effort.)

I asked why Australia didn't have the horrors that you predict would happen should Australian-like gun control laws be put into place in the US.

Your only answer seems to be that the US has too many guns, so therefore can't change. (Which sounds like a bank which is "too big to fail", so we have to keep feeding it taxpayer money.)

> that's the only way to get guns out of american hands

That's irrelevant. As I demonstrated, only about 1/3 of the guns got out of Australian hands. Why would anyone think those same laws would get 100% of the gun out of American hands?

It is believed that most of the relevant guns were not surrendered. If you want the putative benefits, mostly ignoring them is not an option.

I am making no claim about the benefits, only the claimed negative consequences.

merpnderp made the claim that making guns illegal would end up with a "massive number of people going to jail for not obeying, country wide stop and frisk, and New Orleans style door to door SWAT raids to confiscate."

Guns are illegal in Australia, though certainly many guns remain. (Hunting and other guns remain.)

Australia did not end up with a "massive number of people going to jail for not obeying", etc.

Therefore, it's possible to make guns be illegal, in the way Australia has, and not end up with the consequences that merpnderp predicts must necessarily be the case.

Therefore merpnderp's claims are not believable.