Court decisions aside, scofflaws have long made gun control unenforceable

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Sat, 17 Jul 2010 15:58:56 GMT  <== RKBA ==> 

J.D. Tucille - a sample chapter from a book Mr. Tucille intended to write about "how scofflaws limit state power, curbing the reach of government officials and carving out a modicum of liberty even when and where it's officially forbidden." His agent hated it. I love it. Bravo scofflaws. Liberty! [claire]

Maybe he did. Maybe he didn't. I'll never know if that guy went to the black market. But plenty of New Yorkers have chosen to own guns outside the official system. In a city that, as I write, has roughly 37,000 licensed handgun owners and about 21,000 rifle and shotgun licenses, the running guesstimate of illegal firearms stands at two million, give or take a bit.

...

Well, says the Small Arms Survey, a research outfit established by the Swiss government, the United Kingdom, with just shy of 1.8 million legal firearms, has about four million illegal guns. Belgium, with about 458,000 legal firearms, has roughly two million illegal guns. In Germany, the number is 7.2 million legal guns and between 17 and 20 million off-the-books examples of things that go "bang" (a figure with which the German Police Union very publicly agrees). France, says the Survey, has 15-17 million unlawful firearms in a nation where 2.8 million weapons are held in compliance with the law.

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