[Jonty30]

I don’t believe too many criminals subject themselves to a background check, so doing them will not work.

[livius]

He's not talking about background checks. He's talking about keeping people in jail after they've already been arrested for a crime, almost always with an illegal gun, btw. Keeping the bad guys in jail worked in New York, which had given up trying to control its gangs until he took over.

Judges always want to give thugs a slap on the wrist because most of them are young, but the problem is that they're already hardened killers and letting them loose on the population after a few months or even a couple of years in jail does nothing to protect us.

Whenever I see one of those articles about some thug who has "accidentally" killed a child in a drive by shooting of one of his gang rivals, I always see that said thug had already served not one but numerous sentences for earlier offenses but was back on the street to kill again.

I agree that blackmarket weapons should be hard to get and that stopping weapons smuggling should be a priority, but the problem is really the people who use them, and we're not dealing with them very effectively at all.