That would save 30,000 lives a year, many of them 18 and under.
"One dead child is too many".
Let me explain the hard and fast truth to you.
If you want to save as many lives as possible, as quickly as possible, then focusing on hardware is about the least effective thing you can do, and in fact is probably counterproductive.
Guns are tools. They are, by themselves, neither the motive nor the goal of the people that use them in criminal fashion. They are a tool used by career criminals, the enraged, the violent abusers, the depressed, and the hopeless.
Therefore, any attempt to "starve the beast" by simply reducing the number of guns (about 300 million) and the number of gun-owners (about 90 million, maybe a bit more) is doomed to be effectively a failure. Guns are durable devices, easily capable of lasting decades or centuries. Even with changing demographics (e.g., urban population per capita) working in favor of the non-gun-owner, it is unreasonable to imagine less than 25% of Americans owning guns. Even fairly severe measures, designed to make buying and owning a gun a multi-month, expensive, and intrusive process, would take generations to lower the per-capita rate of gun ownership to make it noticeably harder for criminals to get a gun.
But what is the political cost of trying to do so? Poor and working-class people voting for Republicans, and all that entails, simply because they dare to own a gun with a *gasp* pistol grip.
Corporatism. ALEC. Student loan debt. Banks run amok. Oligarchy. For-profit war. Bloated defense budgets. Privatized health insurance, water, electricity, sewers, prisons, parks, highways, canals, elections, and dams. Union-busting, off-shoring, shifting taxes to the non-wealthy. Gerrymandering, unlimited campaign donations, dark money PACs. War on Drugs forever. Corporate personhood. Patents and copyrights that never expire. Monopoly after monopoly after monopoly.
By your own admission, all rifles used in murders are outnumbered by handguns by about 17:1, yet a major plank of the gun-control platform is to target the subsection of rifles that could be defined as "assault weapons".
Is it worth it?
No, it's not. Turning the country over to the right wing is not worth being upset because *gasp* gun design has evolved over the past half-century. It won't save lives, and will cost far more. Everything that is wrong with America now will became much worse. Read any article on DU about a person that dies because of lack of health care, or of corporate negligance, or of pollution in their water or contamination in their food... and imagine it happening tenfold.
What WOULD save lives and vastly improve the standard of living of tens of millions is getting our progressive agenda moving.
Our progressive agenda is, like the conservative one, somewhat nebulous and abstract. But your attempts at gun-control are anything but. People that don't own guns simply don't know or don't care about how the laws affect gun-owners. After all... THEY'LL never have to deal with the effects directly.
Gun owners... they smell the bullshit. When Bloomberg and Feinstein demonize "assault weapons", it's culture war. And when they try to define "assault weapon", it's the height of stupidity.
Try to imagine ANY OTHER CONSUMER GOOD that is very loud, gets hot, emits bright flashes of light, and jumps around during normal use that Democrats proudly and publicly prevent, BY LAW, from muffling, installing heat-shields, flash reducers, or better handles.
Can you imagine that? But that's what an "assault weapon" ban is. Because the military, a substantial purchaser and user of guns, figured out ways to keep their people from getting flash-blinded and burns, to keep a better grip on their guns... those improvements are all of a sudden forbidden!
It's fundamentally stupid, and causes a very organized reaction from those affected by the culture war, while failing to motivate or organize non-gun-owners.
And the fallout? Well, I've already discussed that.
Our progressive agenda is the key to broad prosperity, better opportunity, more economic mobility and growth, better education, better health care, and lower crime rates on a long-term, permanent basis. And liberal policies on recreational drug use and treating drug abuse is the key to immediate and drastic crime-rate reductions.
But it can't happen if your culture war pushes the votes of the very people we need away.
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