"Making guns and ammo scarce" as a solution to gun violence

I thought that I'd share some words written by a lifelong liberal Democrat who has been awarded the highest honor from the American Society of Criminology -- the Michael Hindelang Award. Dr. Gary Kleck received this award for his book "Point Blank" wherein he presented strong empirical evidence supporting the thesis that a very high number of defensive gun uses occur in the U.S. each year. His study -- the NSDS (National Self Defense Survey) has been replicated on a national level a number of times and has yet to be honestly challenged with empirical evidence. For the record, the Michael Hindelang Award has never been bestowed upon any other criminologist for a book on the subject of gun control.

Here's what Dr. Kleck has to say on the subject of "making guns and ammunition scarce" as a solution to gun violence:


Banning the further production and importation of guns falls into the category of closing the corral door after the horses have escaped. There are already over 230 million guns in private hands,* most of which can easily be kept in working condition indefinitely. Further, the number needed to serve all criminal purposes is probably under a half-million. In an imaginative effort to get around this difficulty, Zimring (1976) proposed the “new guns hypothesis.” He noted that the guns seized from criminals were disproportionately of recent vintage, and hinted that criminal use of guns could somehow be reduced merely by slowing the flow of new guns into the stock. Somehow, some criminals either would not be able to get older guns in the absence of newer ones, or would not find older guns suitable for their purposes. The logical flaw in this implied argument is that there is nothing about new guns that makes them inherently more useful for criminal purposes. Indeed, in one respect newer guns are less suitable for criminal purposes. Guns first sold after October 1968, when the Gun Control Act of 1968 went into effect, are easier for authorities to trace than older guns (Zimring 1976), and criminals say they prefer guns that are untraceable (Wright and Rossi 1986:163). Criminals do not use new guns because only new guns can be used in crime or because these are the only guns they can get, but rather because criminals are mostly young people who have been of a gun-owning age for only a short period of time. Indeed, all young people, both criminal and noncriminal, disproportionately own newer versions of almost any consumer durable: very likely a high percentage of their refrigerators and televisions are also comparatively new. Nor is there any evidence that criminals are able to get only new guns; the fact that new guns are easier to get does not imply that older guns are hard to get. Consistent with these arguments, the flow of new guns has no apparent impact on U.S. violence rates (Kleck 1984a).

Some have suggested banning the further manufacture of ammunition instead of guns. Unlike guns, ammunition does not last indefinitely. The powder in gun ammunition eventually becomes unusable, though it may take many decades. Therefore, some have suggested a ban on the manufacture of further ammunition as a substitute for gun bans. If no further ammunition were made, the existing supply would be used up or become unusable, so eventually it would not matter how many guns there were. Since many handguns and long guns have identical calibers and use identical or similar ammunition, however, this scheme could work only if applied to ammunition used in any gun type, not just handguns.

The main technical problem with this scheme is that ammunition is even easier to manufacture at home than guns. This is not even a hypothetical eventuality, since millions of gun owners already handload their own ammunition at home, and these owners alone could easily meet the very limited national need for workable cartidges for either criminal or defensive purposes. Given how rarely criminals or gun-wielding victims actually fire their guns, a dozen rounds replaced every few years would be ample for most criminal or defensive gun owners. Most of the materials in ammunition, such as lead bullets and brass cartidge casings, can be indefinitely recycled. The key item that cannot be reused is the powder. An ammunition ban with any hope of success would have to include a ban on powder, but adequate forms of gunpowder are also easy to home manufacture, and they are certainly easier to make than many widely manufactured illegal drugs or “moonshine” alcohol (Bruce-Briggs 1976; Kaplan 1979; Kates 1984a). The best one could hope for from this measure would be that a few criminal gun users would be unable to make or steal their own ammunition or locate anyone else willing to provide them with some.

Dr. Gary Kleck from “Targeting Guns – Firearms and their Control” pp 373-4
Reprinted with permission from author

* as of the time of writing, 1979

Voluntary disclosure from author which appears in “Targeting Guns”:

The author is a member of the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International USA, Independent Action, Democrats 2000, and Common Cause, among other politically liberal organizations. He is a lifelong registered Democrat, as well as a contributor to liberal Democratic candidates. He is not now, nor has he ever been, a member of, or contributor to, the National Rifle Association, Handgun Control, Inc. nor any other advocacy organization, nor has he received funding for research from any such organization.

Home manufacture of ammunition depends on the availability of manufactured components that are by no means easy to manufacture.

The making of gun-cotton, for instance, is not so simple or safe as it may sound from casual reading; the contrivance of primers would be particularly interesting. A surprising amount of sophisticated design and workmanship goes into even the humble cartridge case.

Without going into specifics lest some teenagers blow their faces off, Guncotton is pretty simple to make, we're talking high-school level chemistry here, with Meth labs being far more complex, and primers can be made from chemicals readily available at local pool supply stores. - Remember, Lead Azide is nasty stuff to try and play with, but it's not the only thing that does the job. Sodium based primers were the standard for years before non-corrosive ones took hold in the US, and eastern europe continued to use them until the 1980's.

Casings can be made not only from brass, but also from aluminum and steel. Extruded Brass is by far the most popular commercially, but you can also machine them with a very cheap Harbor Freight lathe/mill combo.

Bullets... yeah. Lead. Hello.

Sorry, but when you're dealing with hundred plus year old technology, it doesn't take a rocket scientist or a massive factory to create things. (Well at least not when it comes to firearms).

But people embarking on the adventure will find there is considerable craft knowledge involved. Certainly a person with some serious experience of laboratory chemistry would have a shot at managing it without incident, but that lets out just about the whole population of the country..

All shock sensitive explosives are delicate to handle, even those described as 'stable' in the literature; it is a relative description.

A cartridge, of whatever metal, is a bit more than a cap fastened to one end of a length of tube. An amatuer will most easily produce something that will jam in the chamber after firing.

I consider myself an amateur at both, good sir, and find your descriptions woefully inaccurate, as I have produced all of the above myself, and have had neither issue in production nor operation.

I'm afraid I must inform you, that your ideals of individuals being unable to recreate that which was invented over a hundred years ago,
is based only on the preconceptions that exist within your own mind.

I am terribly sorry for your loss.

"The lives people try and lead...."

I don't try to lead any kind of life, I go into the world and try to treat people like I want to be treated, with dignity, respect, and understanding.

I find preconceptions harmful to both those holding these conceptions and those whom they try to hold them over, and thus I will do my best to break the mold they have made for their own mind, and I should hope others would do the same for me.

Filling the casing, with crushed up match heads work damn well....

Also, using the white tip, of "strike anywhere" matches can be used to reload "primers"

This is just ONE powder and primer substitute...

They are poor substitutes at best, and you still have not provided your own casing....

Your missing the point, I did not say it was as good as gun powder, I was just pointing out one substitution, for powder and primers..

As for the casings, as a reloader, I can assure you that with careful reloading, casings will last many many many firings.. And in a pinch, those can be made as well, with tools found in a common machine shop.

It is impossible to "un-invent" anything...it did not even start to happen with prohibition, and with guns and ammo, even more so..

Why??

Because most of the US Population, consider it a RIGHT, to own, firearms...Many would scoff at such a ban.

I personally, would consider it very important to pass my knowledge in this subject, to ANYONE who wants to know...

And, with my skills, and reloading gear, a gun and ammo ban, would serve to make me very wealthy.

You acknowledge that they are not widespread. My point is not that is impossible to manufacture ammunition 'from scratch', only that doing so is a very different thing from purchasing powder and primers and having a ready stock of appropriate brass. It is the differnce between, say, making a kitchen table with items bought from a lumber-yard, and making one with wood one has provided oneself by downing and dressing a tree. The number who can make a creditable job of the former will greatly outnumber those who can make a creditable job of the latter, and it would take a person some time and effort to shift from one class to the other.

Home manufacture of ammunition, as opposed to home assembly of finished components purchased over the counter, would supply very little ammunition by compare to what is available at present. If it were done in the face of a legal ban, it would provide even less, and at a much greater cost. If the scarcity of finished product were the result of a tax raising the price to a level few could afford, those evading the tax generally would price near the level it dictated, though still below it, whether they were dealing with finished product acquired by criminal means, or with home-made articles.

The typical street criminals rarely shoots his gun, nor does he need a high quality one. In the event of a total ban, auto-loaders would almost vanish due to complexity of manufacture. The advantages of revolvers would bring them back to the forefront. Revolvers would be far more tolerant of the wide differences in homemade ammo.

With the public disarmed, criminals would not need guns as knives would do quite well for their purposes.

If you habitually drive or ride in an automobile, your chances of being killed in a traffic accident exceed your chances of being killed by a criminal, possessed of a fire-arm or no, by a significant margin.

there are upwards of 25 in my phone book and that doesn't include places that have machine shops but don't advertise or people that have a shop in their garage. 150 hundred years ago w/ much cruder technology people were able to invent the process what makes you think it can't be reproduced on todays machines by people who know exactly what they're doing?

First, you are maintaining that artisinal, craft shop production will supply an article in comparable quantity and at comparable cost to factory production. This is counter to the whole history of manufacturing.

Second, you are maintaining that because something was first done some years ago, it is therefore simple to do, and requires little in the way of practiced skill. Procure yourself a barrow-ful of hematite, Sir, and several good cords of wood, and perhaps a few other items you can discover for yourself, and let me know when you have a bar of low carbon steel: people managed to do it many years ago, so you should find it no great trick to do today.

At the risk of repetition: my point is not that individual manufacture of ammunition for modern weapons 'from scratch' is impossible, but that it is not easy, requiring real skills and craft knowledge that are not too widely encountered, and that it would not produce a supply of ammunition equal to more than a small fraction of that which is provided by factory manufacturing, which includes re-loading of cartridges with manufactured propellant and primers. No one has brought forward anything that rebuts this; the statement of an individual that he is capable of it hardly suffices as rebuttal, true as it may be.

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It is obvious you lack understanding of the matter under discussion.

I didn't call you the descriptive that got deleted I said your manner of speech gives that impression and I think you do it on purpose.

And I still maintain that the thousands of mom and pop machine shops and hundreds of thousands of home reloading set ups that exist in this country right now could absolutely maintain a flow of ammunition. especially if you add the profit incentive that a ban would bring

I will add this as well, every once in a while someone posts a "Show Your Ammo Stash" thread on one of the gun boards out there. and some of these folk store it in 5 gallon buckets. I've seen pictures on ammunition by the pallet load on some of these sites. there are a hell of a lot of bullets out there right now.

Something to take into account when you start talking about making guns and ammo scarce

You display a complete lack of understanding of the matter under discussion.

First, demand for ammunition is such even at present that, if 'hundreds of mom and pop' operations could compete in terms of quality with the factories, they would already be doing so.

Second, it is the manufacture of ammunition from scratch that is under discussion, not reloading brass with powder and primers purchased over the counter. Reloading set-ups, etc., are meaningless when the question is one of manufacturing the explosives, and putting them into serviceable form.

Third, you do not seem to understand how illegality affects a profit motive. The analogy to manufacture of methamphetamine, or traffic in cocaine, is a poor one. These substances are addictive. Once a person's bodily chemistry has been altered by a sufficient exposure to their effects, the person must have them, and will devote the whole of their lives to obtaining them, on pain of acute physical and emotional distress should thir effort fail. This guarantees a market whose demand is inelastic, that will pay any price, and diminish in number only by incarceration or death. Unless you are to maintain that persons who possess fire-arms are addicted to ammunition, that they will experience 'cold turkey' pains and nauseas, etc., if they lack cartridges, then it must be obvious to you there are profound differences between the illegal market for addictive drugs, and the illegal market that would be summoned into being by a ban on manufacture of ammunition. Persons contemplating the purchase of illegal ammunition would be more or less rational actors; the deterrent effects both of risk and of price would operate to reduce the number of people willing to make such a purchase. The reduction in demand would tend to drive up the price, because price in an illegal trade includes a sizable premium for the risk of punishment to the seller, which does not diminish with diminished sales, because it is a status risk, that one accepts by being in the trade, having made purchases and sales, and possessing the illegal items one traffics in, and that premium for risk must be had, whatever the number of sales it is spread over. Persons who enter an illegal market are criminals, and the necessities of illegal existence will necessarily shape their behavior, or they will quickly come to failure at the hands of the police, or of persons in the market whose nature is better suited to crimnal enterprise. Thus the market in ammunition will quickly become one where the buyer finds himself or herself at risk not just from the police but from the putative supplier, in terms of shoddy or even counterfeit or dangerous merchandise, or simple robbery. Such depredations on the clientele provide larger and quicker profits to the criminal than honest service, and so will certainly become part of his or her methods of operation.

Your closing comment ignores the one feature of a ban even the author of the initial piece appreciates, namely that ammunition deteriorates over time, and that this would be one of the elements that might make a ban on ammunition effective. A man who possesses cartridges by the pallet-load will certainly come to have pallet-loads of junk in due time.

For two of those, the raw materials can't even be produced in the US. But that doesn't stop sophisticated operations from smuggling in thousands of tons per year into the US. And you can't rely on a bullet-sniffing dog.

I have lead deposits very close to my property......

You can see it in the numerous rock cuts along an abandoned RR, the river, and roads near here.... I can scrap it out with my pocket knife......

Now explain to me, how they intend to ban this???

What does lead look like when it is in ore? Does it look like lead?

It often contains silver as well as lead in commercial quantities.

The problem with smelting lead out of ore is the poisonous nature of the process.

Also, in my area, their was extensive Iron mines, and other zinc "only" mines. and even a few copper mines. Not to mention extensive limestone workings.

All within a 10 mile radius of here

Actually, I live within a 5 mile radius, of about 8 old abandoned iron ore furnaces that are still standing. Most date from the 1800's

Copper ores can be strikingly beautiful.

My hobby, my true passion, is history...expechaly military history, and industrial history.. This is why I collect, HISTORICAL MILITARY RIFLES, these are tangible links to our history...I also go explore, long abandoned industries, mines, and supporting infrastructures, IE rail lines, old roads, buildings, and foundations

Here is a Iron Ore mine, who's ore, also had a lot of copper in it, matter of fact, for a while, they had a small tipple to handle the copper. I, took these photos a few years back, These mines, where originally opened in the late 1800's and closed in 1963.

I took lots of photos of these mines, and remaining infrastructure, but these, are the ones you might find most interesting. Since you like copper ores..



Yes, this is a hole...an 800 foot deep one...straight down......



Another mine opening..



here is an example of raw ore...



I also have in my possession, a series of photos, taken of these mines in operation, back in the 1920's

I have several pieces of what I call "rose quartz" which is nothing more than quartz stones, that have streaks of red, or a rose colored tint to them. I used to have a small piece of quartz with very fine "gold like" flakes in it...I don't know if it is, or isn't, but it makes a nice conversation piece.

See, if some of our more rabid anti-gunners in here would put down the personal attacks, they might find out, that we are not the vicious monsters we are routinely portrayed as in here

Actually, Lead, zinc, and limestone where all mined out of the same mine. Limestone is still being mined nearby.

I do have some photos of the veins, near an abandoned rr tunnel nearby. very interesting, I will try to find them, and post them in this thread.

the veins are dull grey, and the rock is a lighter shade of grey...And the limestone, where it outcrops, and gets weathered, can be almost as white as snow.

Actually, I have examples of raw ores, and separated ores, here in a old coffee can, give me a day or two, to post a photo of it.

I live next door to Limestone County. :)

I like to go fossil hunting with my daughter all the time. Our neighborhood is new construction and the rain has washed away the clay and left behind lots of limestone and fossils.

They're huge piles of slate, and if you crack the layers open just right, you get amazing finds. I have about 200lbs at my parents house.

But that is not 'home manufacture' on any scale comparable to people re-loading cartridges today.

Criminal enterprise would, of course, arise only in proportion to the money it could obtain, and all criminal enterprises charge a premium as 'self-insurance' against the risks of violating the law.

It is my understanding, anyway, that dogs are routinely trained to indicate they scent explosives.

Ban guns....

And the "special penalties" for owning machine guns go away, since you will get into just as much trouble for owning a .22 as a machine gun..

Submachine guns, are very SIMPLE to make homemade..

Look at this you tube vid, of a homemade sub machine gun..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPhbdW9SxEM&feature=PlayList&p=F6793E00D99266EA&playnext_from=PL&playnext=1&index=3

I have a friend, whose HOBBY, is homemade guns...And yes, it is legal for him to do so.. And he makes Semi Autos...Which, are very hard to make legaly...A machine gun is much easier to make.

Some of the Soviet sub-machine guns, particularly varieties produced at Leningrad during the seige, are painfully simple.

None of my coments on this matter endorse a ban on guns, or even endorse a ban on ammunition, for that matter. It simply struck me on reading what was presented at the start of the thread that the author of the piece had confused assembly of finished components with manufacture, and so mis-read the potential effect of a measure he was arguing against.

And you can crank out "sten" style submaching guns all day long.

by a reasonably competent machinist or sheet metal worker.

...during the Dutch "police actions" in the late 1940s. They were even more crude than the Sten Mk.III (and even the German Volksmaschinenpistole http://world.guns.ru/smg/smg132-e.htm), but they worked.

in violation of existing laws and they don't seem worried about violating new ones-in fact, that is what they do.
On "new guns vs old guns" - criminals are mainly pretty stupid and fad driven-guns are in part fashion statements for them. New and shiney is always a winning combination - like jewelery, a new gun indicates they are successful and have cash to spend on display. Most criminals are NOT GUN ENTHUSIASTS, any more than they are concerned about having another law do ignore.
Further, violent crime is at a long term low even in the face of a vast increase in the number of legally owned and carried guns in the US...maybe more access to guns for the good citizens was the answer all along...


mark

It is the sudden increase in the ready availability of abortion commencing in the early seventies of the last century. By the nineties, this had had the effect of reducing the proportion of young men within society, and particularly of reducing the number of young people who had been raised under straitened emotional and material circumstances.

I'm not much for social darwinism, but I do know many people walking around right now who are products of terrible parenting and "homes"...some of them actually made decent lives, many did not.

mark

I think the idea of aborting future criminals before birth would make a good book or movie, but I don't belive it has much basis in fact.

Please don't call me sir - I find it pompous and irritating, which I suppose is why you do it.
You are dismissed.
Have a nice day.
mark

http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/DonohueLevittTheImpactOfLegalized2001.pdf

Certainly an instance of unintended consequences: no one saw this as a purpose of the ruling, the interests viewed by all concerned as being at stake having no relation to this outcome.

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The drop in crime can have multiple causes. I also believe that more liberal gun laws can be documented to have also suppressed crime.

The "excerpt" implies some conspiracy to ban guns and ammunition. Or at least to ban guns by artificially causing an ammunition shortage.

The only ammunition shortage I see is from people being stampeded into stockpiling and buying (thereby enriching gun and ammunition manufacturers) ammunition so they have it when the ban that they are convinced is coming happens. Gunsmiths and shops are doing just fine, very well in fact.

So, who is proposing a ban? It's time for people making this claim to provide some evidence to those of us who hear you talking but don't see anyone home.

of at least one frequent flier here abouts...

He actually compared some kind of anti-gun conspiracy by a few anti-gun politicians and organizations, who haven't a chance in hell of changing things, to the colossal wastes of "everybody agrees it's a noble cause" money that are the war on drugs or the war on terror.

"Congrats," I said to him, "it's already over and you won."

You might wish also to detail how said "conspiracy" was compared to the war on drugs. I note you said "a few anti-gun politicians" populated your conspiracy. Didn't the assault weapons ban take a majority of Congress?

And you're still making me laugh with that shit!

Like I said...congrats! You won "the war on guns"! :rofl: I mean...I'd tell you, that you can put down your gun now...but that would just make you continue! :rofl:

"War on Guns"....I tell ya! :rofl: Best laugh I had all week! Oh how you've suffered and had to fight "the man"! :rofl: Hope you're gonna start singing "Ole Man River" to strum up some pathos here!

Also, Violence Policy Center does. Senator Dianne Feinstein, in 1994, said of guns, "If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for an outright ban, picking up every one of them, Mr. and Mrs. America, turn them all in, I would have done it."

Obama has stated that he is in favor of banning semi-autos. He voted for the 2005 Kennedy amendment that was aimed at common rifle ammunition. Sen. Kennedy refered to the venerable 1894 .30-30 hunting round as a cop-killer.

I have heard NO ONE even think that out loud. Never gonna happen.

Politicians will always spout off rhetoric to pander to interest groups, and repeating their rhetoric out of context is a always a reliable way to paint a picture and induce a stampede.

wants to ban "assault weapons"? Or guns with post-1860's magazine capacities? Or dramatically raise ammunition costs via microstamping? Or give the Attorney General the authority to ban ammunition he/she deems "nonsporting"?

I can point you to bill numbers on thomas.loc.gov if you need them...

I don't agree with parts of the assault weapons ban either, but I can see why it makes sense to regulate armor piercing ammunition.

Any recent bills make it out of committee for a vote on banning or confiscation? 30 years ago crime was very high and assassinations were still fresh in peoples minds. Only an assassination or a big uptick in gun crime will bring any call for major restrictions. If the alleged plot to kill a police man and then hundreds more at the funeral had succeeded, I think there would be calls for restrictions led by LEOs.

a couple of times recently.

The biggest issue I have with the passage I quoted is the fact that Kleck doesn't get into the very predictable consequence of an attempt to "make guns and ammunition scarce". As has been pointed out by other members, demand creates it's own supply. If we can't keep cocaine and heroine out of this country, how do you expect we'd fare trying to keep guns and ammo out? Given the national experience with prohibition of alcohol, restricting the g&a supply might provoke the unintended consequence of empowering crime syndicates, but it would hardy be an unpredictable consequence. This renders moot the question of whether or not underground U.S. production could keep pace with demand.

"Who's calling for a ban on guns and ammunition"? Prohibitionist intent by the pro-control crowd is well understood in the gun community -- it's hardly a paranoid delusion. With his treatise "Absolutist Politics in a Moderate Package" Kleck makes a very compelling case for the hidden prohibitionist intent of the pro-control lobby.

They have a right to their opinion, be it based on religious or personal experience. There are many pacifist in the Democratic party and very few if any in the Republican party.
Yet in the last 10 or 20 years, no law has made it out of committee to ban bullets.
While the "pro-control crowd " is well understood in the gun community, the pacifist community is not. Those that subscribe to the philosophy of Gandi and Martin Luther King and the Lamas of buddhism are not ignorant rubes. They are intelligent, thoughtful people that just happen to not agree with you. I would think you might look into their reasoning. While not for everyone, it is a valid path to follow. Empathy is always a good place to start in understanding a different point of view.

rather than trying to compel others to adopt pacifist views at gunpoint, don't you think? "Do as I say or else" is not a particularly pacifist sentiment, though it may be sometimes cloaked as one.

It is possible to be both pacifist with regard to individual self-defense, and opposed to compelling others by force to live by that choice. There are also degrees of pacifism; Ghandi and MLK were not opposed to the ownership and use of arms for individual self-defense, merely the use of arms to effect political change. Quite a few of the Freedom Riders were armed.

There's also the fact that a lot of well-meaning people have been greatly misled about the nature of various gun-control proposals. Plenty of people who would ordinarily never support outlawing the lawful ownership of the most popular civilian rifles, had it been phrased in those terms, nevertheless fell for the "assault weapon" fraud. One does not have to be an "ignorant rube" to fall for a deception, particularly if one is using a trusted-source heuristic.

From Buddhism to Minnonite to Quakers to Unitarians to the family of victims of violence. Do you think anyone wins them over by calling them the "gun control crowd"?. Many of these are very thoughtful intelligent people with very high IQs and I'm not sure I would want to get into an argument with them. Rather than only focus on easy access to handguns, an approach of responsible ownership can win over more people. The overly defensive posture of many advocates here changes few minds. It only adds to the label of paranoid gun rights crowd. Then, I'm sure some come here looking for a fight.

When you've spent much time,energy, reams of paper, and untold quadrillions of electrons proclaiming that "more guns equals
more crime", you tend to lose much credibility when the opposite happens.

You lose even more when one of the main members of your group rates the safety of a locality on the wording of its gun laws, ignoring the actual violent crime and murder rates in said locale.

.

They may be "very thoughtful intelligent people with very high IQs", but if they are demonstrably wrong about something, and because of that error seek to infringe the rights of others, why then I will get into an argument with
them. Being smart and/or being the victim of a tragedy doesn't convey infallibility.

correlations are not always what they seem. Yes there are more guns and crime is down. Great if that holds up over time. I see gun violence is up in Detroit and Toledo along with more gun ownership. If that becomes a trend, your argument will fall apart. Then you'll be demonstrably wrong.
Lower crime rates are due to many variables, less drugs, aging population with high incarceration rates and other demographics that have nothing to do with gun ownership.
Using your argument about the rise of gun ownership and CCWs and a lower crime rate, will you argue the opposite if the number turn in the other direction?

Then you keep referring to "your group" I'm not in any group calling for banning anything. I'm a long time gun owner trying to preserve my rights.

Whether they are Hofferist "true believers", or just pandering to certain constituencies (the most important being contributors), they still maintain the same line on guns, regardless of changed circumstances. An ancien regime as it were, who are still the public face of gun control.

In seeking to maintain their grip on all, they may well lose all.

As for crime rising in Toledo and Detroit- If demographics and economics can be the cause of a reduction in crime (as others
have posited here in this thread), why can't they also be the cause of a rise in crime?

because both cities have been in the news over the last year with stories about the huge rise in gun sales and CCWs issued, all time records.

Personally I'd like to see more honest law abiding citizens having CCWs. I'd also like to see fewer guns in the hands of criminals. I think it would take both to make our homes and streets safer.

And no, I don't think namecalling wins anyone over---no matter which direction the namecalling is coming from. In my opinion, addressing the argument and not the arguer is an important distinction to make. Civility may not win over one's opponent, but civility may sway those in the middle to actually look at the facts.

I would point out, though, that the gun-control lobby (and I'm speaking here of the Brady Campaign, VPC, SHV, et al, not pacifists) are not willing to reconcile themselves with lawful ownership and simply go after gun misuse. They don't want lawful and responsible ownership of 9mm's and AR-15's and guns with post-1860's capacities; they want them banned, or at least restricted to the wealthy and politically connected. They don't want carry licensure; they want carry limited to agents of corporations, agents of the state, and the wealthy/connected. They don't want us shooters to be competent; they want most of us to be nonshooters. And until that changes, giving them half of what they want would simply cost us half our rights, and accomplish nothing more than that.

Gun owners in the UK and Australia tried the approach of kneeling and quietly submitting to whatever the gun-control lobbies deemed "reasonable", and we see where that has gotten them. There is no excuse for incivility, but needlessly throwing away our rights in order to appease the zealots is ultimately self-defeating.

are small in number and as a result of them no new laws have been passed. Just like lumping all militia members with Tim McViegh, putting anyone with a group and generalizing can be a mistake.

which gives them an inordinate amount of leverage. Heck, the media was still running footage of automatic weapons while discussing the AWB as late as 2004, and the New York Times is STILL stumping for it. The rise of new media and the subsequent weakening of the traditional corporate gatekeepers have weakened the gun control lobby/corporate media lockstep, but the pro-new-bans viewpoint is still quite strong.

The party platform still calls for a new ban on "assault weapons" and most double-column magazines, a call repeated incessantly by the corporate media, and the California "assault weapon" fraud is still on the books. The prohibitionists are still backing near-absolute bans in Chicago and D.C. (Heller be damned); those who would profit from ammunition microstamping are still lobbying hard for it; and IANSA is still working hard to curtail the legitimate international firearms trade, something they have a pretty good shot at. The VPC/Brady Campaign are also trying to get new restrictions passed via executive rulemaking, such as a ban on 5.7x28mm pistols and nontraditional looking imported rifles, and they may well succeed.

The only reason that the Feinstein law was allowed to expire in '04, and no new bans have replaced it, is the grassroots activism of gun owners from across the political spectrum. If gun owners sit down and revert to our pre-1994 quiescence, the 1990s BS will most certainly happen again.

Since you can't suggest banning air compressors with a straight face.....

Also: Shares is conspicuous by absence, no?