A new video from Prager University dispels the leftist-held notion that stricter gun control measures will help reduce crime.
Hosted by Fordham University professor Nicholas Johnson, the video explores the various arguments put forward in favor of "common sense gun control" and how none of them has any practical application in reality.
Even putting aside the issue of the Second Amendment to the Constitution, which affirms the right to keep and bear arms, a gun ban has no broad popular support. Never mind the conservative states, handgun ban referendums failed in two of our most liberal states—Massachusetts in 1976 and California in 1982—by large margins. No serious attempts have been made since then.
In any conversation, this would be the moment the gun control enthusiast shouts "Australia" to say gun bans work, but as the video shows, that just couldn't be effectively applied to the United States.
Let’s take a closer look at Australia.
In 1996, after a lunatic used a semiautomatic rifle to murder 34 people in Tasmania, the Australian government banned all semi-automatic rifles and repeating shotguns.
Owners of roughly 700,000 registered firearms – about a quarter of the country’s three million total guns – were required to turn them in for destruction. The government called this a 'buyback,' but in fact no one had a choice.
As my research shows, this model will not work in the United States for the simple reason that the U.S. has roughly 325 million guns. This is orders of magnitude more than any other country. Even if the Australian plan were tried in the U.S. and worked to perfection, we’d still be left with over 200 million guns, including handguns, which account for nearly 80 percent of gun crime.
On the issue of gun confiscation, aside from putting people and government at tremendous odds with each other, they always result in black market gun-running.
The 2007 International Small Arms Survey studied 72 countries that attempted to enforce gun confiscation or registration on their citizens. They found massive defiance of these laws, with only about a third of owners complying.
If Americans defy gun bans at just the average rate that has occurred internationally, then we should expect tens of millions of guns to flood into the black market.
So, if the evidence so clearly skews in the right's favor, then why do leftist politicians constantly give pie-in-the-sky promises about gun control? Johnson believes they just want to pander to a certain crowd for votes, to have their cake and eat it too.
Not surprisingly, politicians advocating for gun control prefer to avoid the thorny issues that confiscation raises. Instead, they seek to have it both ways.
They pursue the votes of gun owners by paying lip service to the Second Amendment and offering assurances that they only want to ban “the bad guns” like rifles with pistol grips.
And at the same time, they pander to their core constituents with broad gun ban rhetoric, and supply control proposals that will have a marginal effect at best. And when these meager efforts fail to pass or to work? Blame the gun lobby.
So, to the glib critics of America’s gun culture, we should make this demand: If supply controls are the answer, describe precisely the full program of supply-side policies you propose to stop the gun crimes that we all abhor. And then tell us how those policies will also allow lawful gun owners to keep and protect themselves with firearms.
If you cannot square these two things, then you must convince Americans that they are better off under policies that would disarm good people, in a fruitless attempt to keep bad men from getting guns.
