Summations Only

That is one contention. I'm witness to exactly that here in my home state, Illinois, and the city I work in, St. Louis, MO. Forget gun control altogether and focus on economic disparity, education, and healthcare. Access limitations only work on people who are willing to follow the laws in the first place. Also, there's tons of guns laying around so I don't see how you can actually limit the access. I think the effects will be negligible, a waste of time and money, and only end up punishing the law-abiding citizens. We need to figure out what to do with the high concentrations of poor uneducated people.I see it all the time here in St. Louis, we have a homicide rate of 35/100,000! North City is straight hood, and they're shooting each other left and right up there. The State is a conceal carry one, but they made it illegal to carry within the city limits of St. Louis. That hasn't done a goddamned thing to stop all the murders on the North side.

Like what, specifically?

Not off the top of my head...Do you have some specific examples?

Is that all? According to this site, there have already been 34 shootings in Chicago alone this year in January 2014... you know, where guns were practically banned.

Pretty much.You can read the legislation here:http://www.isp.state.il.us/docs/ordinances/chicago.pdfGuns were illegal to possess outside of your home.

Yeah, and it is worthless if it is practically unenforceable. Well, "banned" only means prohibited, rather than made vanished.Chicago's law was a complete failure. Not only did it fail to achieve the results they wanted, it was also ruled as unconstitutional.Given there's another ~80% of the state of Illinois, which has a small fraction of the crime¹, that has to be bothered by their impeding legislation², and that the large amounts of money it costs could have been better spent, Chicago's law ended up at a negative worth in my opinion.1. From Message 1303,

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lets consider the state I live in: Illinois. We have about 3 million people living in our biggest city: Chicago. There's about 10 million of us in the rest of the state. In Chicago, there were 436 homicides in 2010 among 3 million people. That leaves 268 homides among the other 10 million of us. So for kills per million (kpm), the entire state is at 54 kpm. But Chicago is at 145 kpm while the rest of the state is only at 27 kpm.

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2. Not only did they fail to keep up with renewing people's cards on time, but they spent waay too much money doing a bad job (half a million dollars to the cops for overtime in 2 years). See the Auditor General's report from 2012

I live in Illinois, this is what affects me. Illinois wasted millions of dollars making the other 80% of the state also use these stupid plastic FOID cards (that didn't help the problem), because Chicago has such a problem. There are way better ways to reduce violence in Chicago than making the state police ensure that southern Illinois deer hunters have a little plastic card.

Because Chicago's legislation sucked and they're a bunch of crooks up there anyways. Have you seen how many of our governors went to prison? Well, how do you enforce their gun-ban, short of searching every individual that leaves their house? What's the difference? Neither magically make the prohibited item vanish.And, in this case specifically, how do you go from prohibiting the possession of guns outside of the home in theory, to prohibiting the possession of guns outside of the home in practice?Exactly how is that enforced?

That's just one part.Another part is focusing millions of dollars on making sure deer hunters in the southern portions of the state are carrying around a little plastic card. That money could have been spent on something that actually had an impact on the crime in Chicago. I don't know. Okay, now how do you enforce that in regards to prohibiting guns from being possessed outside of the home?

That's what I'm saying... that Chicago law was worthless. Because our legislators are idiots? Oh, I'd rather guns not be prohibited. And I'd also like to not have to abide by stupid laws...

Well I think you're being naively generous in that assessment; don't forget that we know that our ex-governors were criminals. I don't think we can take our legislators' word for it on what their motives were.It seems to me that they want to know who is capable of buying a firearm. I mean, look at the way they went about it. Rather than focusing on the felons and insane, they look to everyone else but them. Analogy time:Let's say that I own a bus company. I then have everyone with brown, black, and blonde hair provide me with their name, address, phone number, gender, race, social security and drivers license number, and also a photograph of themself. And then I tell you that my reason for all that was to keep the redheads off of the bus.You see what I mean? As long as its not at the expense of everyone else's right.And "not optimum" is about the most lenient description you could offer. Chicago's law was an unconstitutional failure.If you want to keep redheads off your bus, then you stop them when they try to get on. You don't make a detailed database of all the non-redheads. So then, if the same thing is applied to different tests, and the results are wildly different, then we can figure that the thing wasn't a factor in the results.Are the people who run NYC a bunch of criminals?
What's their police presence like?
How's their education system?
What's their percentage of blacks?I'm sure there's much more impactful factors than gun permits.

The reason is that you are unable to come up with a way to enforce the prohibition in practice.

Like, been-to-prison criminals? Four of our last seven governors actually went to prison. Its more than that... They made it illegal to possess a handgun outside of your home. Hell, its illegal for you to just hold a bullet if you don't have a FOID card, which is silly. No, you can't legally buy a gun without a FOID card. I meant capability in the legal sense. Obviously laws can't stop people who don't obey laws. Because by widening your focus to every single person in the state, you're failing to focus on the felons and insane. Looking at everybody is the opposite of focusing on somebody. Or you could just prove which people have red hair and leave the rest of them alone. You've loaded your question differently than I would. I wouldn't "let" homicidal maniacs have weapons because of an "inconvenience", no.I now see that you wrote "legal" access in what I was replying to, so I could have phrased that better. Right. So if you want to prevent those people from getting guns, you create a system to check against those databases at the point of purchase. If you just want to prevent those people from having guns, you don't need to build a database of information for every single person who is interested in obtaining a gun. That they went the route of building a database of information for every single person who is interested in obtaining a gun, exposes the fact that they were interested in more than just preventing those people from getting guns. Maybe we should spend more time investigating the criminals, rather than bothering all the law abiding citizens. I think the majority of people who shot somebody, and the majority of people who were shot, were black.

Fixed that for ya. Sensible? It was ruled as unconstitutional. Not without a barrel and a firing pin. Well, maybe if you threw it really hard or dropped it off of a high enough building. "Old-fashioned fascism will take it away!" Ah, yeah, I shouldn't have excluded them from the "everyone" grouping, you're right. I don't know what they use or have, but I trust them with as little as possible. Driving is a priviledge, not a right. The data isn't all that great, but blacks do make up the largest portion of both murder victims and killers according to this site:Breaking news and analysis from the U.S. and around the world at WSJ.com. Politics, Economics, Markets, Life & Arts, and in-depth reporting.There's a big chunk of "unknown" in the killer data. And that doesn't necessarily correlate directly with gun crime, but where I come from, almost all of our gun crime is black-on-black.Here you can find a map of the murders in St. Louis along with the predominant race of the sections they were in:A Divided City - Graphic - NYTimes.com

If you have a right for something, then you should get it by default. The government shouldn't track everyone and then "allow" them to do it, they should just get to do it from the get-go. It'd be silly to have a free speech card that allows you the right to free speech, and then take that card away from everyone who doesn't have the right. The default is that everyone has free speech.You don't have a right to drive on public roads. Only certain people are allowed to do that. So it makes sense to issue a card out to all the people who are allowed to drive, and then take it away from people who have lost that privilege. The default is that you don't get to drive on public roads until you've shown that you can.In the US, individuals have a right to own guns. So it doesn't make sense to issue a card to everyone who has that right, and then take it away from the people who don't. The default is that you get to own guns.