SOME THOUGHTS ON GERMAN GUNS: Germany has strict gun control. Most of the stories I’ve seen say there are about 10 million legally-owned guns in a country of 82 million. The estimates on illegal guns tend to be about double that, or 20 million guns. That means with strict gun control — far stricter than one could reasonably expect in the United States, where owning guns is a deeper-rooted tradition, and where obedience to authority is not — there are about 3/8 as many firearms as there are people. In the United States the ration of guns to people is approximately one to one.

It’s thus probably fair to take the 3/8 ratio as an upper bound for the effectiveness of gun control were it enacted in the United States. 3/8 of the U.S. population would be something over 90 million. So the most gun-controllers could hope for would be to reduce the number of guns in America to 90 million, which still sounds like a lot to me. And it could be accomplished only via a program that would be enormously polarizing politically, and sure to do immense damage to civil liberties — if it didn’t set off something like a civil war, which it very well might. All to produce a society that is not exactly disarmed, in which criminals (as in Germany) can still get guns easily.

Sounds like a dumb idea to me.