greed and death wrote:Free Soviets wrote:i think the real issue when it comes to success or failure in regulation is how easy the regulations are to get around and how inherently 'worth it' people think the thing being regulated is. booze and minor drugs have a huge amount of inherent worth, and its not hard at all to make them. however, other drugs are more complicated to make, and those are correspondingly harder to get.
making guns harder to get is pretty damn easy, if a nation decides to do it. at least if it is generally capable of handling standard government functions and isn't being opposed by some powerful group outright supplying them to people. that's where most of the countries that have both restrictive laws and large amounts of gun laws fall down.
Fire arms are fairly easy to make, most certainly easier than meth or LSD, and once you account for the vast fields of pot you need I would say making a fire arm is easier than pot. The parts for a firearms have so many other applications that purchasing them does not set off alarm bells like the purchase of precursors for meth and LSD. Marijuana requires space to grow either inside in which case electricity usage will set off alarm bells with local law enforcement or outside in which case DEA satellite and fly overs will set off alarm bells.
The next part of your equation is the 'worth it' factor. Firearm ownership is at ~35%, only 11.5% of people 12 and older have used marijuana in the last year. So we look at a relatively high worth it factor say roughly 3 times marijuana. So in the US no a near complete ban by your logic would be less effective than current marijuana prohibition.
nah. you are mistaking raw usage numbers with valuation of that usage. owning, let alone making, guns illegally in places without ready access to them (and hence not being able to do anything other than fondle them quietly in a windowless room) just doesn't strike many people as worthwhile. this is radically different from the joys of getting high.
we have the rest of the world to look to for data. and out there, countries have routinely decreased the number of weapons available in them - including nigh-total disarmament. the ones with functioning governments simply do not see a spike in illegally manufactured weapons.