Quote:
Originally Posted by White Doors
True, but guns already have a 'fingerprint' of their own. Putting a sticker on them with a government registration number is needless to say, ineffective. GUN registry is a red herring meant to make everyone feel safer while doing absolutely nothing to make that the case.
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That may be--but I'm not particularly interested in debating the pros and cons of an individual policy. Registering guns seems like it should be a non-issue to me: every day people register their dogs, their cars, their boats, in some cities they register their bicycles, and in both the U.S. and Canada, they register THEMSELVES. Why are guns special? In principle, I think registration is merely a way of keeping track of what guns are out there--and if that's all it achieves, I'm fine with it. It ought to be a simple, cheap program--the fact that the Canadian government is having trouble doing it cheaply is neither a surprise nor particularly relevant to the merits of the larger issue.
The "fingerprint" you speak of is useless without one of two things: a registry which includes ballistic fingerprints, or an actual gun to compare ballistics data against. It's hard to argue that the former wouldn't sometimes help police to do their jobs. With that said, you'll get no argument from me that police need more money, and that more money should be spent on education programs. These are separate issues.
As for the Great Britain study you refer to: I'd like to see some data on it. It's not that I don't believe that you've seen it, just that I'm interested in the methodology of wide-ranging longitudinal studies like that--and they often tend to be flawed. You may well be right that crime is on the decline in the developed world--I don't know. But it's interesting that one place this is NOT the case is the U.S., where gun laws are the weakest. I'm not suggesting that there's a correlation--just showing how the Great Britain argument may not work too well either. If the two places that violence rises are the place with the strongest gun laws and the weakest gun laws (I'm not convinced this is the case, but for argument's sake, let's say that's true...) then that indicates that at best there is no relation between gun laws and gun crime. If that's so, then that doesn't really address the other issues around gun control--since it was never conceived (or ought not to have been) as a form of social engineering anyway.