We can't stop drug importation. What makes you think that we can stop guns?

> and we had less of them we would have a safer less violent society.

"less of them"? We can take away all of the deer rifles and not change US violence at all. A collector with 100 guns is not more dangerous than one with 25.

The vast majority of US gun violence is committed by people who are already involved in other illegal activities involving other illegal substances. It is absurd to think that they can be disarmed by legal means.

It takes about 1% of the "by physical volume" drug smuggling to provide them with a new gun per crime.

If anything guns are harder to ban than drugs (because they're easier to make and smuggle), and that was true before 3d printing became a thing.

Hello, I'm British.

Better solutions don't have to be perfect, as the country of my birth demonstrates: still has drugs smuggled in, sometimes even has firearms, even a few mass shootings.

But firearms are banned so effectively that even the police don't routinely carry them — the handful of officers I've ever seen armed in the UK, in person, were all in airports.

The four nations of the UK combined had around 700 homicides in total in each recent year, which is about the same as Philidelphia plus half of Baltimore. It's not just because the US is more populous, the per-capita homicide rate in the UK is about 80% lower in the UK than in the US.

I know the UK is unusual — I'm in Berlin now, and the cops here have what looks like a pistol, not that I'd be able to distinguish it in the holster from a taser or a pistol shaped pepper spray — but there's a whole world of other ways to do things than what each of us takes for granted, and we can learn from each other if we don't shut out the possibility.