Or, really, "Bring on the Guns?" because questions abounded, and answers absconded. So the sub-title of the second installment is (as though destiny could be defeated) "Doing the math".
But first the obligatory recap. When last seen The Dastardly Gun Grabber had displayed stats showing decreasing gun murder rates in the U.S., and increasing numbers of firearms owned by our folks as a background item. Oh those dastardly Gun Grabbers, every vile trick in the book. And, still, all to no avail. The Intrepid Freedom Fighters came out of the woodwork, and from every imagineable hiddy-hole, and, likely, some even crawled from the sewer through manhole covers. YOU DON'T GRAB GUNS IN THIS COUNTRY WITHOUT A FIGHT! Or without at least some minimal resistance. Meaning not one Freedom Fighter budged an inch, either way, no matter what. More guns? Not just NO!, but, well ambivalence. Fewer guns? Not just NO! but, well, ambivalence.
Did I mention that no one budged an inch either way?
Onward, then. (Don't like my numbers? Don't read them. Want to use your own numbers? Feel free. I mostly never give cites. Instead, I know stuff, and I use what I know. Any decent amount of research will show that I'm at least in the right ballpark on all of this stuff. But I'm an editorialist, not a journalist. If you need "facts and sources", find them. I'm misquoting/misrepresenting? The down side of choosing to run with the Freedom Fighter Posse comes from principles like "conspiracy", and "aiding and abetting" under which "admissibility" gets broadly enhanced. It is what it is. On the other hand, if you want to know what I'm thinking, read on.)
So one standard conversation/set of talking points goes like "gun ownership in the U.S. is up, and our gun murder rates are dropping. If it ain't broke, don't fix it." And I'm ceratinly open minded enough to take a look at that, thus the option of "bring on the guns".
What that looks like in one of its manifestations is we have a net increase in gun units owned of between 100,000,000 and 150,000,000. I'll go with 100,000,000 for this purpose. And the approximate time period over which that was happening (roughly the last twenty or so years), also show a decrease in our number of gun murders of between 39% and 49%. I'll again give the benefit of the doubt and go with 49%. And to keep things simple, we'll go with a comparison to the current situation in Switzerland, where the gun murder rate now stands at .52 per 100,000 population.
The base starting point then will be our current gun murder rate of 3.6 per 100,000 of population. Half of that (49% reduction) would lower our rate to 1.8 and result in another increase of our gun units owned of 100,000,000. Half reduction in murder rate is .9, and another 100,000,000 guns. And the final reduction brings us right in the Switzerland ballpark, with our third addition of 100,000,000 guns. (And, yes, I have left time, past or future population change, and everything else entirely out of this calculation.) So seemingly, the only thing we have to do to get to the point where all of us together are murdering "only" 1,650 of each other every year is to get another 300,000,000 weapons built, bought, and distributed. (And around another 400,000,000 guns on top of that would move from the .52 Switzerland rate to the .13 Australia rate, so heaven help us if we ever decided to try to match leading nations like Japan and Norway.)
Hell, what could possibly go wrong with that program.