This argument has been made repeatedly, but it never seems to sink in. The vast majority of proposed gun laws demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of how the world works. It should be obvious, but apparently it is not, to many people; and that is this: criminals do not obey laws. It’s that simple. Laws which mandate more and more hoops to jump through to purchase a gun, laws which require mandatory registration, background checks, purchase limits, etc. will only hinder people who obey those laws. The only thing that these laws will do, is make life more difficult for law abiding citizens. Criminals will not be hindered by them.
All that laws do is outline standardized threats of revenge that the government will seek against anyone who does certain things. That’s it. Laws don’t actually prevent the action. It’s just a threat that if they catch you doing it, they will put you in a cage, or take away some of your money, to punish you.
So, obviously, if someone thinks that can get away with it, or if doing the act is worth suffering the punishment, or if they’re just so emotional & caught up in the moment that they’re not thinking about the consequences, or if they’re planning to kill themselves afterwards so it doesn’t matter, then they’ll do it anyway. Laws aren’t magic. They’re just words.
This issue can be illustrated several different ways, but perhaps the easiest & most straightforward is this. Here are graphs using data from the Federal Bureau of Justice Statistics [1] [2], which shows how criminals obtained the guns which they used to commit crimes. There are 3 graphs: one for 1997, one for 2004, and a much more recent one for 2016.
In the following data for 2016, they provided more sub-slices to the “other” category to provide some more clarification, so I’ve added those wedges in.
As you can clearly see, consistently for 2 decades, 75 – 80% of the guns used to commit crimes, were obtained through avenues which are completely immune to gun control laws. All that these laws are doing is making it more difficult for law abiding citizens to get guns to defend themselves. The criminals are getting them regardless.
A corroborating study by the University of Pittsburgh which “analyzed data on 762 cases in which a gun was recovered by the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police Firearm Tracking Unit (FTU)” found that:
“Most perpetrators (79%) were carrying a gun that did not belong to them.”
— University of Pittsburgh [3]
Something else you should notice from these graphs: I broke up the purchases wedge into all of its constituent parts (Retail store, Pawnshop, Flea market, & Gun show). Something that many gun control advocates often use as a scare tactic is gun shows. They stoke up fear telling the story of how anyone can go to a gun show and get a gun without a background check, and then go off and commit a terrible crime; insinuating that such potential is a huge avenue by which mountains of criminals obtain “deadly weapons” which they then use to commit heinous crimes. It is often ominously referred to as “the gun show loophole”. First of all, the lack of a background check is only true of private sales. If you buy a gun at a gun show from a licensed dealer, it is no different than buying it from a store. Secondly, as you can clearly see, “the gun show loophole” is bullshit. You can see for yourself, in every single one of these graphs, gun shows & flea markets have each consistently accounted for 1% or less of the guns used to commit crimes. Meanwhile, 75 – 80% were obtained through avenues which will remain completely unaffected by gun control laws (“street/illegal source”, “family/friend“, “Brought by someone else”, & “Found at the scene of the crime/victim”).
Update – 9/3/2024: Added more recent data for 2016, from a 2019 report. And some minor rewrites.
Update – 10/24/2024: Corrected typo/error in 2004 & 2026 pie chart labels. When I made these graphs in Microsoft Excel, I made the first one, got all the styles & everything the way I wanted it, and then copy & pasted the graph and changed the data source cells to make the others. But, I had manually edited the “Street/illegal source” label, by pushing the word “source” to a new line. But, when you edit data label text, Excel starts treating that label as an exact piece of fixed text, instead of retaining its link to the data values. When I duplicated the graph to make the other two, I forgot to reset the data labels, and so the graphs for 2004 & 2016, ended up retaining that edited data label from the 1997 graph, and all 3 graphs had 37.26% for “Street/illegal source” data label. The actual pie charts were & still are accurate, it was just the number in the text label that was wrong. They are fixed now.
Full Series:
Part 1 – Violent Crime By Weapon
Part 2 – Firearm Homicides
Part 3 – “Guns make it easier” and Children Hurting Themselves
Part 4 – Mass Shootings
Part 5 – Why Gun Control Won’t Work & The Gun Show Loophole
Citations
- Bureau of Justice Statistics – Firearm Violence, 1993-2011; Table 14: “Source of firearms possessed by state prison inmates at time of offense, 1997 and 2004”
https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/fv9311.pdf - Bureau of Justice Statistics – Source and Use of Firearms Involved in Crimes: Survey of Prison Inmates, 2016; Table 5: “Among state and federal prisoners who had possessed a firearm during the offense for which they were serving time, sources and methods used to obtain a firearm, 2016”
https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/suficspi16.pdf - University of Pittsburgh – Gaps continue in firearm surveillance: Evidence from a large U.S. City Bureau of Police
https://www.socialmedicine.info/index.php/socialmedicine/article/view/852/1649
