If your solutions won't solve the problem, they aren't solutions

When the people on your own side tell you that what you want to do won't accomplish what you want to accomplish, maybe you should listen:

Justice Department researchers have concluded that an assault weapons ban is “unlikely to have an effect on gun violence,” but President Obama has not accepted their report as his administration’s official position.

“Since assault weapons are not a major contributor to US gun homicide and the existing stock of guns is large, an assault weapon ban is unlikely to have an impact on gun violence,” the DOJ’s National Institute for Justice explains in a January 4 report obtained by the National Rifle Association. “If coupled with a gun buyback and no exemptions then it could be effective.” That idea is also undermined by the acknowledgement that “a complete elimination of assault weapons would not have a large impact on gun homicides.”

Let's face it -- even a gun buy-back would have to be mandatory, and most places that is called confiscation.  If somebody offers you $500 for a product you paid $1,500 for, are you taking it? Especially if you can't replace it? Yeah, I didn't think so.

So, if the measures you are pushing won't achieve the goals you aspire to, and you know it, what can we conclude? Maybe they're lying when they say they don't want to take our guns? While this columnist called it a "mistake," a Washington state legislator introduced a bill  that mandated yearly visits by police to gun-owners' homes to make sure the guns are stored safely. Fourth Amendment, anyone?

“In order to continue to possess an assault weapon that was legally possessed on the effective date of this section, the person possessing shall ... safely and securely store the assault weapon. The sheriff of the county may, no more than once per year, conduct an inspection to ensure compliance with this subsection.”

 As the columnist in Seattle points out, the legislator in question immediately claimed that the provision was a mistake and shouldn't have been in the bill. Right -- except the same legislator introduced the same bill twice before. Seriously? Three strikes and you're out. But progressives/liberals will never stop trying to restrict your right to own  a weapon.

And it isn't about ending "gun violence." Libs love to say that they just want to stop the killing. OK, so ban cars. They kill more people than guns. And two-thirds of the annual gun deaths are suicides. Do you think banning guns will make people stop killing themselves? Get a grip.

Plus, the gun bans that libs push demonstrably don't work. Connecticut has a ban on the kind of weapon used in the Newtown school shootings. Chicago has a complete ban on handgun ownership. How's that working? And the District of Columbia also had a complete ban on handgun ownership until the Supreme Court told them to knock it off. But the District was Murder City during the '80s --because the criminals were the ones with guns. Now, after the court decision striking down the gun ban, the District's murder rate is at its lowest level in decades. (No links here because I'm fucking tired. Use Google.)

It doesn't matter how much proof you throw at progressives, they still push gun control. Doesn't work? Don't care. It isn't about what works. Look at Massachusetts and what happened when it enacted very restrictive gun laws:

The 1998 legislation did cut down, quite sharply, on the legal use of guns in Massachusetts. Within four years, the number of active gun licenses in the state had plummeted. "There were nearly 1.5 million active gun licenses in Massachusetts in 1998," the AP reported. "In June [2002], that number was down to just 200,000." The author of the law, state Senator Cheryl Jacques, was pleased that the Bay State's stiff new restrictions had made it possible to "weed out the clutter."

But the law that was so tough on law-abiding gun owners had quite a different impact on criminals.

Since 1998, gun crime in Massachusetts has gotten worse, not better. Instead of "lead[ing] the way in cracking down on gun violence," the state has seen gun violence shoot up. In 2011, Massachusetts recorded 122 murders committed with firearms, the Boston Globe reported this month – "a striking increase from the 65 in 1998." Other crimes rose too. Between 1998 and 2011, robbery with firearms climbed 20.7 percent. Aggravated assaults jumped 26.7 percent.

The laws cut back legal use of guns, not illegal use. And the libs in Massachusetts can't blame their neighbors:

Relative to the rest of the country, or to just the states on its borders, Massachusetts since 1998 has become a more dangerous state. Economist John Lott, using FBI crime data since 1980, shows how dramatic the contrast has been. In 1998, Massachusetts' murder rate equaled about 70 percent of the rate for Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New York. Now it equals 125 percent of that rate. Clearly something bad happened to Massachusetts 15 years ago. Blaming the neighbors may be ideologically comforting. But those aren't the states whose crime rates are up. 

So when Barry and the rest of you libs start talking about "common sense" gun control laws, could you please exercise some of that common sense? Not to mention, constitutional sense.