Main RW point: Gun laws won't prevent criminals

[SpankMe]

5. My POV is a bit more nuanced

That gun laws won't prevent criminals from getting guns is too general of a statement. There's a time factor involved. Here's some context:

A gun law passed this week won't prevent a criminal from getting a gun the following week. Or the following month. Or, maybe the following year.

But, a carefully crafted suite of new regulations put in place now absolutely will prevent a majority of criminals from getting guns 5 or 10 years from now. Gun laws have to be put into place; regulatory structures have to be created, implemented and allowed to mature and be refined as loopholes are discovered.

And, you're still going to have a few that slip through the cracks. But the overall body count will be a lot less as the decades progress.

Concurrent to all this, national attitudes toward guns will have to evolve. Owning a gun should be politically incorrect or unseemly, like smoking is today.

I'd bet real money that if we'd put some ass behind new gun laws after Sandy Hook, we would see fewer mass gun deaths today.