[halostatue]

Thing is, gun control laws work. See Scotland after Dunblane, Australia after Port Arthur. See Canada’s per-capita murder rate and gun death rate in comparison to those of the U.S., where gun control laws are essentially nonexistent.

Passing the right laws on drugs (abuse) works (see Portugal). Prohibition doesn’t, but treatment does. (And, the truth is that the drug laws in the U.S. are working; they just aren’t working for the citizenry, but the police state. This is by design, and there’s a not-insignificant marginalization/targeting of minorities by design in these laws, too.)

Encryption is…rather more subtle to deal with, because you cannot weaken it for one purpose without weakening it for all purposes, because math and physics. Better that they work on laws that target actions and behaviours rather than technologies. Then again, any time I see a politician talking about terrorism, I recognize that they are attempting to increase their own power at the expense of those without power to begin with.

[azurelogic]

I agree about "right" drug laws, but many of the countries supporting this idea are not "right" drug law kind of places.

As for guns, they trot out "terrorism" as the reason for wanting to get rid of encryption. Well, gun laws have yet to stop terrorism. If they couldn't find a gun, they made a bomb, or they used an airplane, etc.

[halostatue]

Strong gun laws have, in fact, stopped most mass killings in places that have them. Not entirely, obviously (the mass attack on the Bataclan theatre and elsewhere in Paris in 2015), but these are exceptions.

In the U.S., there have been more than one mass shooting every month in 2017 even under the most ridiculous definition (4+ people killed, indiscriminately, in a public place; this would not include someone who killed 5 people in a targeted manner). Using a looser definition (4+ people killed or injured), there have been almost 7 per week in the U.S.

There have been far fewer than that in Canada. In Toronto, there have been 26 murders total, and perhaps two “mass shootings” by either definition. The main mass shooting story in Canada this year is the terrorist attack on the mosque in Quebec. In the U.S.? Too many to say that there’s a main one (although the attack on the Congressional baseball game will probably be the one that gets talked about).

Source: http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/15/health/mass-shootings-in-2017-...