Seth wrote:The law strictly prohibits the transfer of any firearm to a disqualified person and levies harsh federal prison sentences on people who do so, which means you're wrong.
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Except it won't work because criminals won't turn in their handguns.
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Actually it can't because the Supreme Court has held that the right to keep and bear a handgun specifically is a protected right under the 2nd Amendment.
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Yo, dude! It's illegal for a criminal to carry a concealed handgun already. In fact it's illegal for a criminal to so much as lay a finger on a firearm or as much as a single round of ammunition and has been for a hundred years or more. And yet that law hasn't prevent criminals from illegally carrying concealed hand guns now has it?
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The only gun regulation that has had a demonstrable positive effect on reducing gun violence is the widespread enactment of "shall issue" concealed carry laws that allow law abiding citizens to be armed in public for self defense.
That's it.
Nothing else has been remotely effective at keeping guns of any kind out of the hands of criminals. You might cite all the various background check rejections as proof, but you'd be largely wrong. Something like 70 percent of such NICS denials are eventually overturned on appeal because of errors in the system, and there is absolutely no evidence whatever that any of the other 30 percent did not eventually get a firearm without a NICS check anyway. All we know is that a specific transaction was denied, not that it "kept a gun out of the hands of a criminal." It may have kept THAT gun out of his hands, but that says nothing about getting it from an illegal source. Worse, the prosecution rate on the part of the feds for violations of the GCA, like falsifying the Form 4473, lying or making a straw purchase for a known disqualified person is less than 5 percent when it should be 100 percent. In other words, the feds themselves are refusing to enforce the very laws that they claim prevent criminals from getting guns...which they don't.
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The good thing about the US is that hoplophobe fuckwits from other countries don't get to tell us what's "unnecessary" to the enjoyment of our civil rights and what isn't.
Fallacious appeals to common practice.
