Fight Gun Violence with Guns?
There are an estimated 280 million to 300 million guns in private hands
in America—many legally owned, many not. Each year, more than 4 million
new guns enter the market. This level of gun saturation has occurred
not because the anti-gun lobby has been consistently outflanked by its
adversaries in the National Rifle Association, though it has been. The
NRA is quite obviously a powerful organization, but like many effective
pressure groups, it is powerful in good part because so many Americans
are predisposed to agree with its basic message.
America’s level of gun ownership means that even if the Supreme
Court—which ruled in 2008 that the Second Amendment gives citizens the
individual right to own firearms, as gun advocates have long
insisted—suddenly reversed itself and ruled that the individual
ownership of handguns was illegal, there would be no practical way for a
democratic country to locate and seize those guns.
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