[diego]

Why? What country is close enough to the US in size, heterogeneity and number of guns so that you can make a fair comparison?

Edit to answer to the comment below: think what you want. Don't try to convince me. I'm skeptical, you're not. Write to your legislators instead of here. Write your own blog posts.

[RyanMcGreal]

> What country is close enough to the US in size, heterogeneity and number of guns so that you can make a fair comparison?

In terms of number of guns, no other country is. That's the point: other countries made decisions and implemented policies to severely restrict access to guns, and the predictable result today is that there are far fewer guns and much less gun violence.

The decision to restrict guns is a long-term decision - it won't reduce gun violence overnight, but it will reduce gun violence over decades.

[hga]

The Swiss are an obvious exception, although their gun-grabbers are steady tightening things.

But I think you're wrong about the path that restrictions would take in the US: the slowly boiling a frog approach won't accomplish the goal, anything too quick, sharp and raw will merely spark the 2nd American Civil War during which "gun violence" will go way up. And most any restriction scheme will increase gun violence, if only on the part of the authorities using force to seize guns and the like.

Maybe in the long term public attitudes could be changed, the 2nd Amendment repealed, and the path you envision might happen, but that's the work of generations and will require a reversal of the renorming of gun ownership we've seen in the last quarter century (I take Florida's 1987 establishment of a shall issue concealed carry license regime as the start; today 42 states have them, de facto or de jure).

[RyanMcGreal]

Gun control in the US can start with control of those types of firearms most likely to be used in mass shootings: automatic and semi-automatic weapons with magazines that accommodate large numbers of rounds. The US can do what other countries have done successfully: ban sales, restrict ownership, and offer amnesty/buyback for weapons already in circulation.

The US can also mandate safe storage of weapons and ammunition in separate, locked, secure cases. That in itself would reduce the incidence of gun suicide and so-called crimes of passion by introducing a long-enough delay between decision and action that sanity prevails.

[hga]

And the fact that "the US" (I assume the Federal government) trying to do this now, before changing the culture (see Holder's 1995 remarks on "brainwashing") would spark a civil war is ... a minor detail?

Unless by "restrict ownership" you mean, say, the same as the current policy for handguns, can't buy unless you're 21? Can be gifted with one, though.

"Lock up your safety" (so called "safe storage") is off the table per the Supreme Court. D.C. insisted on that sort of insanity and got slapped down in Heller, the state must allow guns to be readily available for self-defense.

[RyanMcGreal]

I don't think a real commitment to gun control would spark a civil war. So far, the paranoid right-wing tough talk has not coalesced into anything like a real movement, let alone a rebellion, despite the widespread belief among a certain segment of Americans that the president is a radical Muslim, foreign-born Manchurian candidate determined to turn American by stealth into a socialist dictatorship.

Then again, I might be wrong about the civil war bit. It's possible that America is simply culturally incapable of regulating its firearms in a safe, responsible way, and that a death-by-firearms rate several orders of magnitude higher than the rest of the industrialized world is an intractable side-effect.

[hga]

"Then again, I might be wrong about the civil war bit."

Given that, if you live in the US, it's a "you bet your life" proposition, you'd best be very careful before possibly sparking one, no matter how low a probability you think it is from people you've shown yourself to know nothing about. And you're definitely limited in your imagination, we've watched recent history and know "real movements" as such aren't an option (at least in the beginning). Fortunately they're not needed.

You would also do well to remember a couple of quotes misattributed to Imperial Japanese Navy Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku, the architect of their attack on Pearl Harbor:

"I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve."

"You cannot invade the mainland United States. There would be a rifle behind every blade of grass."

[grecy]

Size is irrelevant, these are per-capita statistics.

If heterogeneity was a factor, surely homicide rates would be climbing in countries like Canada and Australia that have the highest immigration rates in the Developed world[1]. They are not.

Number of guns is precisely the factor at the heart of the issue.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_net_migrat...