...1) Somebody claimed that violent crime decreased as a result of tightening gun restrictions in other countries. This is patently false. There are many more examples of increases in violent crime following gun bans than decreases...
Even in a country like the United Kingdom, which probably has the worse crime rates of any EU nation, the violent crime rate is lower than the United States.
2)...The wild west argument is amusing given the violent crime rate during those days were LOWER than they are today...
Yeah... and they didn't have semi-automatic assault weapons back then either. Maybe we should go back to those days...
3) The 2nd amendment was never intended for hunting or recreational shooting...The important thing to note is that the 2nd amendment was intended to also allow us to defend ourselves against THEM as well...
No that's not true since the same Constitution calls that (waging war against the government) treason. The intent of the Second Amendment was to maintain a militia of armed people that could be called up to defend the country if needed.
4) With 3D printing technology, a magazine capacity limit will do absolutely nothing to curb violent crime. To think otherwise is patently naive and ignorant. The only people turning in their magazines will be law abiding citizens, the people who contribute less than 1% to the overall crime rate. There are plenty examples of people being assaulted by 4+ people. Good luck defending yourself against that many people with fewer than 10 rounds per magazine. The case of the woman in Georgia unloading 5 rounds center mass into a burglar, only for him to drive away is reason enough for people to have "high capacity ammunition devices." It's never a good idea to base your decisions on the country's future on movies and video games.
3D printed/plastic/ceramic firearms would fall under the Undetectable Firearms Act, which is up for re-authorization this year. It is illegal to manufacture a firearm without some feature that can be detected by an airport metal detector, with the exception that you are a licensed manufacturer who is fabricating one for testing. As it is right now, you don't see very many plastic guns for them to be a threat.
5) Additionally, we can't even stop PEOPLE from jumping our borders and stop illegal drugs from being smuggled. Don't think for a minute that the illegal gun trade won't spike, resulting in even MORE crime.
A lot of that is because we have a gun lobby (the NRA) that is preventing us from producing meaningful legislation that would curb that. If straw sales were prohibited, the gun show loophole were closed, and the capability of tracing fireams were restored we could make some serious inroads towards reducing those types of crimes.
6) The argument that 1,000s of deaths are being caused by the perceived "lax" gun laws is horribly ill-informed. Given that more than 90% of violent crimes are committed by illegally obtained firearms, that just simply doesn't hold up to the facts.
Like I said before, virtually all firearms are initially obtained legally. The fact that we are not allowed to trace a firearm, record the transfer of the same nor perform background checks on private sales just exacerbates the issue. The truth of the matter is that thousands of deaths are being caused by firearms in states that have lax gun laws. In fact some of your highest incidents of gun deaths occur in states with the loosest gun laws.
The New York AWB is a terrible law, and there will be no decrease in crime. But the law wasn't intended to reduce crime, it was intended to disarm the populace. The fact that people can support such a hackjob of a bill is downright shocking, and at the end of the day they will reap what they sow - a likely sharp INCREASE in violent crime.
That's just speculation. We will have to see how effective it will be in the future.
The solution isn't to do nothing. I've personally laid out plenty of approaches to this issue. The reason why the focus on guns is a mistake is because historically gun bans and tight regulations have done nothing to reduce violent crime. As I've said before, as gun laws have been loosened over the past decade, violent crime has been on a steady decline. Whether there is causation here is a moot point - if looser gun laws really resulted in increased crime, this wouldn't be the trend. This country has a lot of things to sort out, but the "gun culture" is not one of them.
You do noting and you get a little more than one mass shooting with an assault weapon a week and who knows how many more school shootings (there was another yesterday). We should do something since that is what most people want. Have you looked at the polls lately?