sorry, your posted started out kind of ridiculous and you are you, so i assumed it would stay ridiculous!
Please don't assume this I am trying really hard to not be ridiculous :*(
It's the culture that needs to change, Kaempfer. It's true that just banning guns isn't going to make the required difference, but there has to be some roadmap that ends with a full and unconditional ban of all firearms. The arguments that people say in favor of firearm possession are usually true only in today's context; such as that it will give criminals an advantage. In reality, many criminals don't own firearms either in those countries where there is no gun culture.
Of course it will always be possible to buy a gun. The thing is that it's quite a bit more expensive in countries where they're banned, which makes it impractical for a large group of criminals to get one. You can't just set up a factory in someone's basement and importing them from, say, Turkey, is difficult and costly.
I agree that the culture needs to change, but in certain places (like the US) there have to be a great number of intermediate steps before gun bans can be put in place. People in the US grumble about the fact that there is an automatic weapons ban; what the hell could the average civilian need an automatic weapon for?
What I am saying is that many places that put flat-out bans on things view the situation in entirely a black and white manner, and that is far worse than proper regulation. Look at the US' stance on marijuana (which
is illegal there)- possession can land you the same sentence as possession of much harder, much worse drugs (like heroine). This is because there is no framework for specific punishment, which leads to a culture of crime; petty criminals become major criminals in the eyes of the law and, in turn, start to become major criminals in truth.
I don't smoke druges but I am super-pro-legalizations of marijuana in Canada granted it had similar restrictions as alcohol. Not only would it pretty much eliminate 60% of the "drug dealers" in the major cities, but it'd also keep a huge number of people out of jail. I don't want to go into this too much because this isn't what the topic is about but...
The correlation I am making here is that if you ban something, then it becomes a criminal activity. In a place where guns are very much a part of culture, you have to set up reasonable government controls that will make people more likely to come forward about gun crime, because they will be less worried about being thrown in jail for owning a gun. If the word "gun" becomes associated with "crime" in a place like the US, then just knowing someone who owns a gun is going to alienate you from the police, which is very bad.
And yeah, obviously guns are more dangerous than cars, but there need to be easy to access programs for proper care of the firearms that are legally owned already. It would be nice to say
all guns are banishe!! but there need to be a huge number of radically progressive steps before you can start to get guns off the streets, never mind out of the hands of global arms dealers.
Also interesting: there are a tonne of guns in Canada but out gun murder rate is like 1/1000th that of the USA per capita!