Criminals take the path of least resistance

It never ceases to amaze me how much faith gun banners have in gun control laws.

They accept that there are already laws against all of the ways that people can misuse guns, like armed robbery, aggravated assault, and murder. They very clearly realize that those laws are broken with impunity by criminals. Somehow, though, they think it will be different when just the right gun control law is enacted (and have no doubt about that-- the one they want is a total prohibition of all guns of all types... they have passed thousands of "common sense" measures over the years, and all it does is whet their appetite for the grand prize).

Gun haters like to cite the statistic that 2/3 of murders are committed with guns, and leap from that observation to the conclusion that banning guns would cut our murder rate, if not by two-thirds, then at least by some other large percentage.

They seem to think that the people who are defined by their disobedience to laws (criminals) are going to obey the law that says they can't have a gun-- when most of them (having felony records) ALREADY are not allowed to possess a gun.

It boggles the mind-- yet a lot of people still make the argument. It's a kind of fuzzy logic that leads them to make statements like "There are already too many guns on the streets, as anyone who reads the newspaper can see. Anything we can do to reduce this will be a good thing."

That's all the justification they need to pass any gun control laws they can ram through. They don't ever stop and consider that the only people who will be disarmed by a gun law are the good people who would only use a gun to defend themselves or others. They have the idea that any steps they can take to even incrementally reduce the number of "guns on the street" will be beneficial, even if those "guns on the street" they're eliminating are all from people who only want to protect themselves from criminals.

I don't like it any more than the gun haters do, but the truth is that armed criminals are here to stay. That genie is simply not going back into the bottle. If you want to stop armed criminals, the only way to do that is to put them in prison for a long time. It is not possible to make them into nice people by writing law after law until, finally, guns simply cease to be.

The gun grabbers like to point out that most criminals get their guns by stealing them from lawful gun owners (or buying them from the burglars who have). This, they think, is evidence as to why those lawful gun owners must be disarmed: If they didn't own the guns, they could not be stolen and end up on the black market.

In truth, there are countless ways the criminals can and do get guns. Stealing from lawful people is one of those, but by no means the only one. Even if it is by far the biggest source of guns for criminals, that does not mean that if there were a change in laws that affected the supply line to criminals, that one of the other sources would not expand to fill the void.

Any cop who has worked in drug interdiction will tell you that it's an endless fight. There may be one big drug lord who controls most of the drug market. The cops can spend a ton of resources going after him, and finally they manage to arrest some key people and that drug cartel falls apart. And as soon as that happens, another one pops up to take its place. The disruption in supply will barely be felt. As long as there is money to be made in selling something, then someone will be there to make that money.

With drugs, it's like the "Whack A Mole" game you may have played. You can cut off the main supply, and the instant you do, one or more of the lesser supply chains immediately grows to take up the slack.

It's not just like that with drugs. The supply chain of guns (which, like drugs, are illegal for criminals) is the same way. You can observe that the main source TODAY is from this or that, and the second you close it off, another supply appears. It's like trying to stop water from seeking the lowest level.

The war on drugs has been a complete failure. People who want drugs can still get them, despite decades of total prohibition and many billions spent on enforcement. But the criminals always find a way, don't they?

The armed criminals in America have gotten used to doing "business" the way they do. They want guns, and as history has shown us, if a criminal wants to get something, he will get it. Since it is already illegal for criminals to possess guns, there is already an established black market for them in the US. Banning guns would not make them go away any more than Prohibition made alcohol go away, or drug banning has made drugs go away.

How else could criminals get guns, if not from burglaries and straw purchases?

They could import them. From China aboard a giant container freighter (China manufactures a huge number of guns, and I don't think their government would have any issue with them being sold to our criminals, as long as they could deny knowledge), or perhaps from Central America via Mexico.

Despite what the media has been trying to tell people, the vast majority of guns and other arms being used in the drug war in Mexico have not come from America. (The "90%" figure you may have seen in the media refers to the percentage of guns that Mexico has asked the BATFE to trace for them which end up being of American origin. The Mexican authorities don't ask the US to trace the origin of the arms that are clearly from their own military, or the military of Guatemala or Nicaragua.)

The arms being used in the Mexican drug war are machine guns, rocket launchers, mortars-- the kinds of things you don't see in gun shops in the US. Corruption in the Mexican army and police forces, and other governments in South and Central America, leads them to sell military and law enforcement arms to gangsters. Government officials are often given the choice of taking a bribe or taking a bullet; it's not hard to see why many of them opt to play along with the gangsters.

In Jamaica, it apparently is not uncommon for thugs to ambush and kill police officers in order to steal their guns. This has thankfully not happened (or not happened enough for me to read about it) in America, since criminals don't have to go to such extremes to get guns. But think about the things criminals have killed for that we've heard of in the news-- they have killed for a nice set of shoes! Does anyone really think criminals would not stoop to this level if they could not get guns through other means? Shoes make your feet look good, but guns, for the armed criminal, are a necessity. I think they'd go at least as far for a gun as for a pair of shoes!

And if that ever did happen here, imagine how much more often the police would end up shooting innocent people who turned out to be holding a cell phone or glasses case, because those officers were so terrified that they were about to be killed so some criminal can take their guns.

In Los Angeles, many members of the famous Crips and Bloods gangs managed to infiltrate the LAPD, and it is also known that gangs have had their members join the US armed forces as well. If it became necessary to their operations, they could use this as a source of guns, by stealing them from the armory or the evidence room.

Or maybe the enterprising criminals would just make their guns. There is a Youtube video floating around of a Pakistani arms bazaar, including footage of them manufacturing copies of various guns. Using crude tools, under a tent, they make fully functioning machine guns, rifles, and handguns. And the average home hobby machinist has better tools than these Pakistanis!

It should be abundantly clear that a criminal who wants a gun will get a gun. Making laws to ban guns will only prevent good people from defending themselves-- it won't stop the criminals from arming themselves.

Every criminal who wants a gun has one, and that won't change. The best we can do is lock the criminals up for a long time, and support the right of the good people to own and carry guns to defend themselves. Going after the guns rather than the people who think it's okay to murder has never worked. It's not the gun that's the problem... it's the criminal. Even if we could make guns disappear forever, the people that are so full of hate, who think murder is okay, would still not be safe for us to have in our society.