This thread made me pop out of the woodwork after three years of lurking here. This is my second post on this board. (I just posted a welcome in the classroom) I'm sure I'm going to get STFU NOOB!, but I happen to have just a little bit of knowledge about this issue.
I've made a fulltime living selling guns in Central Ohio for the last 10 years, and recently became a Type 7 FFL/ Type 2 SOT. (For the cliffnotes on that shorthand, I'm a licensed manufacturer of guns, machineguns & silencers. Here we are on a performance car enthusiasts website discussing gun control. There are so many parallels between high performance automobiles and guns, I can't begin to name them all.
Suffice it to say, as far as potential lethality, any car is much more dangerous than any gun. Dirty Harry's 44 magnum contained 684 foot pounds of muzzle energy per pull of the trigger. How many foot pounds of energy does a 3,000 lb car going 60 mph have?
The biggest proponents of gun control are the same people who believe no one needs a street car that will go faster than 70mph because that's the legal speed limit, and if we all were legislated into driving electric cars, the world would be a safer place.
Gun laws do nothing to legislate personal responsibility. The ONLY place you can control childrens access to firearms is within the walls of your own home, so education is key. As several others have mentioned, Criminals by definition don't bother to obey laws and don't obtain firearms through legal channels. You want to make a small fortune (illegally)? Purchase a bunch of handguns legally and take them and some ammunition to a major city with restrictive gun control. The same handgun you can purchase here for $500 sells for $1500 in NYC or Washington DC on the black market. That's for a "clean piece". Once it's used in a shooting, the scumbags give it away for free because they don't want to be caught holding the gun they used in a shooting.
Firearms are relatively simple mechanical devices. Legislate them enough and make the black market lucrative enough, and the streets will be flooded. Cocaine is a controlled substance, posession of any amount is good for jail time, yet hand the average college student $500 and give them an hour and they'll come back with some. By the same token, hand the right person $500 and they'll be back with a "black market" gun in the same amount of time.
BTW, don't fall for the statistics of gun control. More children under age 5 drown in 5 gallon buckets than are shot in the USA. In order to get the horrid statistics about how many "children" are maimed and killed by firearms every year, "they" have to take the age of "children" up to 23 in order to include all the gang bangers who shoot each other.
