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I mean, El Salvador basically did a small version of that by just rounding up and locking up the most violent people they could find (as judged by gang affiliation) and it worked fabulously. Murder rates plummeting down immediately.
Didn't need to go after every citizen to see if they had guns, just find the dangerous ones. They arrested and imprisoned about 80,000 people, which is not nothing, but much more modest than forcing millions to hand over weapons.
I have many reasons to believe a similar approach would do the same in the U.S.
Sure, but that won't catch people who snap and go on a spree, or accidental deaths, or suicides etc. But it's not like there is any chance of either happening in the US.
I think those are a proportionally negligible as to the total number of deaths that occur annually, though.
Like, a couple hundred even in the worst years, in the U.S.
Stopping those would probably require a massive surveillance state which would cost billions annually and would, like with gun confiscations, oppress 'normal' citizens. To say nothing of the potential for abuses.
The other way to stop those is to arm responsible citizens who can stop them as they happen
I dunno, seems like aggressively arresting and locking up the most violent citizens would also tip the balance in favor of letting the remaining citizens remain armed, making the chances of an armed citizen being able to stop a random spree killer a bit higher.
What really chafes me is that all discussion is sucked into the gun control debate so we can't have a decent discussion about other policy approaches.
Indeed, but as we are talking Thanos snapping, we can handle the small issues and the big ones too. No additional cost. Of course there are better ways than snapping away the guns as we mentioned above, just fix the aggressive people, then nobody really has much of a need for firearms, so we can get rid of those to stop accidents and the like. We can even stop animals being aggressive to humans as well.
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Right, but as we are Thanos snapping we might as well deal with the small stuff too, there is no extra cost to it.
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