discoursedrome:

the annoying thing about all the US gun control debates is that everybody wants to come up with a single gun policy that can be seamlessly applied to both a person who lives in a cabin 100 miles from the nearest city and one who lives downtown in a major metropolis and that is not realistic

Except…there’s a reason for that, right?

The US is a single country with a single economy.  Our government goes to a lot of pains to ensure that this is true.  And so long as you can drive a pickup truck from the sticks to the metropolis without having to go through a guarded checkpoint, the rules in the single-most-lax gun control regime in America will be functionally the rules for all of America.  You can’t allow something to be bought and sold in Place A without there being a fully-supplied market for it in Place B, unless you impose commerce controls, and we are 100% unwilling to do that.

See also: drugs and fireworks.

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On a semi-related note, it’s worth remembering that while the recent dust-ups could be cast as “the interests of rural America vs. the interests of urban America”…they are not actually that thing, at least not in a material sense.  The driving gun control issue isn’t (e.g.) “criminal organizations do criminal things with guns in our cities,” it’s “there are mass shootings,” and the mass shootings haven’t been particularly limited to urban areas.