Guns and Gun Laws

The December 2017 issue of Reason magazine includes an article, How To Talk With Your Kids About Guns. It begins with two statements.
"1. The number of privately held firearms in America has nearly doubled in tthe last two decades while the number of gun murders per capita was cut in half.
2. The number of kids abducted by strangers in 2011 was 105, out of approximately 73 million children in the United States. That's down slightly from 115 two decades ago."

"Too often absent from both sides of the debate are well-parsed statistics. Restrictionists will cite the 33,000 annual gun deaths in America." "Two-thirds of gun deaths are suicides." Next most are young men aged 15-34 killed in homicides, often gang-related. The 1,700 women murdered each year are usually a result of domestic violence.

Attempts to restrict gun sales in order to catch a minority of misusers yield all kinds of unintended consequences.

Every time an incident such as Stephen Paddock killing 58 people at a concert in Las Vegas happens, political demagogues, and like-minded folks, want more legal restrictions on guns. Unintended consequences and the effectiveness of such laws -- including if they get enforced or not -- in preventing future homicides matter very little. What matters most is the advocates' intent. They seem to believe that passing another law with a new provision that conceivably might have prevented the most recent homicide will prevent future ones. Reality just doesn't work that way.