How Shameful Policies Increase America's Gun Violence | Trevor Burrus | Cato Institute

How Shameful Policies Increase America's Gun Violence | Trevor Burrus | Cato Institute: "As usual, the primary focus is on guns rather than those who misuse them, but unfortunately both President Obama’s and Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s proposals will do little to keep guns out of the hands of criminals. There are 300 million guns in America, and, without a politically impossible and undesirable program of mass confiscation, it will continue to be quite easy for wrongdoers to get weapons in America. Perhaps, instead of trying to extract a thimbleful of water from that ocean of weapons, we should shift our focus to why so many Americans want to harm each other."

"Many of the proposed causes for America’s uniquely violent culture — from video games to taking God out of schools — have little scientific backing and seem like irrelevant squabbles over tastes and preferences. Yet government programs that do real, measurable harm to our citizens and predictably push them toward gun violence are too often overlooked."

"As Prohibition-era America showed, banning a highly in-demand substance increases the violence surrounding that substance. When legal methods cannot be used to settle contract and other disputes, extra-legal methods (i.e., the point of a gun) will be used. Moreover, unsavory characters will tend to traffic the prohibited substances, further escalating violent business practices."

"A 2001 Justice Department study found that 20 percent of prison inmates received their guns from a drug dealer or off the street. Comparatively, only 0.7 percent of the weapons were obtained at gun shows. Which “loophole” should we be focusing on closing?"

"Left with few avenues to better their situation, inner-city children increasingly turn to the drug trade and other types of criminal activities that offer better immediate futures than staying in useless schools, and then often find themselves caught by the war on drugs."