Jill Filipovic, of no discernable expertise in firearms policy, thinks outlawing guns will disarm criminals because there wouldn’t be anything to steal.

Welcome to reality.

Fewer guns mean fewer killings, and we all know it
The NRA and other “gun rights” proponents claim that if guns are restricted, only outlaws and bad guys will have guns. But if it were harder to buy guns, they would also stay out of the hands of irresponsible men and women, whose negligent treatment of their weapons results in a great number of deaths and injuries every year, many of which involve children. Many criminals, too, aren’t the plotting masterminds we imagine them to be. A tougher road to gun ownership would mean that impetuous gun crimes, or crimes of passion, would simply be less likely to happen.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates that 232,400 guns are stolen per year. Most are never recovered.

So let’s guess that in the past ten years, 2,324,000 guns hit the streets. Could be a lot more; some estimates of stolen guns run as high as 600,000 per year. And of course, there were plenty already out there before those. Based on trends, I’d guess at least 1,300,000 were stolen in the next ten years back.

So just in twenty years we have in the neighborhood of 3.5 million completely unaccounted for guns in criminal hands. (Plus all the years before that; I suspect the stolen guns total for my lifespan is in excess of 5 million.)

That, Ms. Filipovic, is why we tell you that if you somehow managed to outlaw all guns, the outlaws will still have them.

Heck, you victim disarmers have never managed more than a 13.44% compliance on simple registration, from otherwise law-abiding people. Do you think you can get 100% compliance on a ban from actual criminals with untraceable weapons?

[Permission to republish this article is granted so long as it is not edited and the author and The Zelman Partisans are credited.]

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