[WS:] Actually it is - or to be more precise, there are many factors involved here and access to guns is only one of them and in most cases only a marginal one. My problems with attempts to explain homicide (and crime in general) by referring to some general characteristics - such as socio-demographic background or access to guns - is that these attempts fail to explain an obvious yet frequently overlooked fact: that most people with those characteristic do not kill other people (or commit other crimes for that matter.) What is more, most persons who eventually commit homicide do not do so all the time - which would be a logical consequence of the general characteristic explanation (e.g. if being a minority male under 25 with easy access to firearms somewhat "caused" criminal behavior -we would see persons with these characteristics killing others all the time or at least often - which is patently false.) So we really need to look into individual acts of homicide and factors that triggered it.
In overwhelming majority of cases people kill other people for a reason. By "reason" I do not mean of course that their action is justifiable in the ordinary sense of the word, but that the act of killing is an intentional and targeted response to some interaction that preceded it. To use an example cited by Katz - two males were dining at a fast food restaurant, one was taking food from the plate of the other, at some point the latter pulled a knife and stabbed the "food thief" to death. While stealing food is certainly not a "reason" for killing a person, the way it was done "dissed" i.e. humiliated the person involved and the loss of respect caused that person to avenge it by physically attacking the "thief." Nothing in the interaction that provoked the attack had anything to do with the availability of guns - in fact the killer did not even have a gun, he used a knife.
Most of homicides, including gang related ones, fall into this pattern of interaction - the perp targets the victim for a "reason" that has little to do with the possession of any kind of weapon. It is even difficult to argue in this case that access to a gun makes the outcome of such an attack more lethal, because other weapons - knives, axes, even baseball bats - can be equally lethal. More importantly, the killer had no intention of attacking more than the intended victim. Only when multiple targets are intended a fire arm offers a clear advantage over other types of weapon, but such cases are rare. In the great majority of cases, the absence of fire arms would at best result in a greater chance of survival in such attacks - a nontrivial consideration, but virtually impossible to attain, given the US legal system.
The only effective regulatory measure that would effectively reduce the number of deaths resulting from such attack is the outright confiscation of ALL fire arms in private hands - and it is simply not feasible under the US legal system. Regulating only certain types of weapons - e.g.those that have cosmetic characteristics of "assault weapons" - will do nothing to substantially reduce the number of homicides, because there is plenty of other types of weapons that are unaffected by the regulation but which are just as lethal as these "military style" weapons. Keep it in mind that in most cases of homicide the perp does not need an "assault rifle" with multiple magazine clips since the intended target of the attack is a single individual.
This obviously leaves out mass shootings where access to rapid fire weapons does make a difference in the outcome of the attack. But again, a regulation will work only if it takes all (or most) weapons of this kind from private hands. Since in Europe few weapons of this kind were in the private hands to begin with, a ban on sales effectively eliminated private access to such weapons. However, the US is already flooded with this kinds of weapons, a ban on further sales will have little effect of their availability.
In sum, while I am in favor of taking fire arms from private hands for several reasons, I do not think that this is politically possible in the US, at least without a revolution. The regulatory measures that can pass under the US laws are mostly symbolic and will likely to have no effect on homicide. I would still support such measures for purely political reasons - mainly to spite Republicans, the NRA and conservative white rural and suburban males - but I have no illusion about the effectiveness of this regulation in reducing homicide rates.
The genie is out of the bottle and it cannot be easily put back - and certainly not by the half-ass measures that the US political process will produce.
-- Wojtek
"An anarchist is a neoliberal without money."