You can't keep the bad guns out. Allow armed citizens.

November 6, 2:50 PMDenver Gun Rights ExaminerDan Bidstrup

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England is an island.  If you can't keep guns off an island, where can you succeed?  England has some of the strictest gun laws among western democracies. The latest law in 1997, basically barred all but .22 caliber rifles and shotguns from ownership by average citizens. In spite of this, gun crimes continue to rise in London. It seems that cheap guns are easy enough to get that gang fights which used to be settled with knives are now prosecuted with guns. Not only does this show the futility of banning guns because people who don't value the law will always break the law, but banning anything creates a black market and that economy fosters organized crime.  Any time a good is made artificially scarce, such as a legal ban, the profit margin for supplying it illegally skyrockets.  Organized crime is the mechanism that fulfills this black market and profits handsomely from it.  This applies to any good, even difficult to handle items such as illegal perishable meats.

This isn't just an English phenomenon either.  India reports rising gun use by criminals.  If you remember, India's strict gun control laws were highlighted during the Mumbai massacre in 2008 where no armed citizens slowed the terrorists and even many of the police officers didn't have guns.   Australia banned most all guns in 1996, confiscating and destroying over a half million firearms.  They too have seen a steady rise in gun crime as the criminals don't seem to follow the law.  As has been said many times before, allowing law abiding citizens to have and carry guns does not affect the access to, or use of guns by criminals.  While there might be a very slight increase in accidental gun deaths, the beneficial effects on overall violent crime rates and the number of murders, rapes and violent crimes stopped by citizens defending themselves with guns far outweigh those costs.

Even before they banned guns in the U.K. in 1997, research from 1992 by Hans Toch and Alan J. Lizotte showed an inverse correlation between gun density in the population and the violent crime data for that population. “The fact that national patterns show little violent crime where guns are most dense implies that guns do not elicit aggression in any meaningful way. . . . Quite the contrary, these findings suggest that high saturations of guns in places, or something correlated with that condition, inhibit illegal aggression.”  Hans Toch & Alan J. Lizotte, Research and Policy: The Case for Gun Control, in PSYCHOLOGY & SOCIAL POLICY 223, 232 (Peter Suedfeld & Philip E. Tetlock eds., 1992)

Research by John Lott and others up to the present day find the same thing.  Arming the law abiding citizens doesn't cause mass carnage, but does lead to a reduction in violent crime. When will the anti-gun crowd accept the truths of history and the facts on the ground?

UPDATE:  We grieve for the families of those who lost loved ones in the massacre at Fort Hood, Texas.  Please pray for the healing of those wounded in the attack.  Here again, firearms in a gun free zone were illegally used to lethal effect.  Do you think the military might reconsider its gun carry policy?