Reply #104: At a distance, yes. Close in, not so much. [View All]

But just as with drugs, criminal availability on the black market and rate of ownership by the lawful and nonviolent are not all that closely correlated. If you take a very fine-grained look at where most of the violence occurs, you'll find that most of it occurs in places with extremely low rates of lawful gun ownership, even when considering states with high ownership rates elsewhere. I'm not claiming causality by any means, merely pointing out that the exceedingly low rate of gun ownership by the law-abiding in Chicago or D.C. doesn't prevent the criminals actually committing the violence from doing so.

The right of the lawful and responsible to own guns in the United States is settled, as are the parameters of what guns we can and cannot lawfully own. Gun ownership is not going away, and fighting to marginalize or criminalize responsible ownership will prevent addressing the more relevant sociological factors, just as it did in 1994, IMO.