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I live in New York State, which has some of the strictest statewide anti-handgun laws in the country. It's one of the oldest laws too, dating to 1911. To even own a handgun legally--not carry it, just own it at all and have it in your house--you need to jump through the following hoops. Pay $20 to get an application form. Fill it out with all sorts of juicy details. Not too bad so far. Also submit a full set of fingerprints and a mug shot. Then pay another $100 to have the form processed.
And wait. Legally, the issuing agency (local police) are supposed to get to it within six months, but it's been known to take up to a year. And really, there's no way to enforce the six month limit, and complaining about how long it takes might get you rejected. In fact, they can reject your application for ANY REASON, including that they're just in a bad mood that day, or they don't like you, or you're a Democrat, etcetera. And if that happens, you are permanently barred from owning a handgun in New York State unless you want to hire a lawyer and throw a few thousand dollars at the issue.
Let's suppose that you get approved. Then you've got to submit a letter to the police providing the make and model of the gun you intend to buy, its serial number, a spent shell casing, and drop another $55 to get it approved on your permit. Oh, and you've also got to pay $15 for additional "valid" copies of your permit, since you need to have one on you if you ever intend to carry the gun anywhere (even just to the shooting range). Failure to do any part of this may result in the revocation of your permit and the loss of any future right to own a gun.
Now considering how difficult and costly the state of New York has made it to get a gun legally, you'd think that either we'd have very few gun deaths, or they'd mostly be with rifles and shotguns, which are less regulated, right? Wrong. New York had 800 gun homicides in 2007. Less than fifty were with rifles and shotguns combined. And most of those handguns were, of course, obtained illegally, because legal gun owners rarely shoot people.
This is where the analogy to the drug war comes in, and the old definition of insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. We've been trying to restrict the flow and use of drugs for 75+ years, and it's gotten us nowhere. We've been trying to restrict the availability of guns for the same period of time, and it's also gotten us nowhere. The idiocy in this situation is acting like doing more of the same thing and calling it a solution.
The obvious solution is to change the approach to the problem, and stop treating American citizens as if they're dangerous prisoners. Creating such a vital black market just empowers the people who really ARE dangerous. What we should say is that if you want to buy a gun, fine, and we'll focus on making sure criminals don't get them. If you want to buy a joint, fine, and we'll focus on making sure people don't get hooked on heroin.
But it's a lot easier for people to just scream emotional, nonsensical slogans like "Dead children! Soft on drugs! Soft on crime!" And to pretend that following an already failed strategy is somehow a plan to make things better.
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