Legislation requiring the registration of handguns and some control over the distribution and sale of handguns should be passed. Legislation banning the sale of any automatic weapon, including assault rifles, should be adopted. Such action should be taken at the federal level because guns, like the issue, cross state lines and make a mockery of the patchwork, state-by-state approach that presently exists. An examination of the issue shows that the arguments of the gun lobby are empty and that instituting controls on handguns in every state would reduce the number of guns in circulation and thus reduce the number of crimes committed with handguns.
Opponents of gun control believe that any controls at all, such as those on assault weapons in the Brady Bill legislation, will lead in time to the confiscation of guns, and they point to the Second Amendment as protecting the rights of the law-abiding to own guns. It has indeed been suggested that more guns in society would be a benefit because law-abiding citizens could protect themselves from the criminal element, an idea that is countered by the evidence:
The evidence that crime reduction can be achieved through the proliferation of gun ownership and gun carrying is weak, and the strategy is dangerous because it is based on the false premise that acquiring a firearm for protection will, in general, make people safer (Weil 300).
One reason offered for gun control is that it will help take handguns out of the hands of criminals. Gary Kleck suggests that this is not a good idea because criminals will turn to other weapons, including weapons more deadly:
Assuming we succeeded in making handguns unavailable, to at least some would be criminals, the remaining weapon choice would not be guns versus knives or other nongun weapons. Rather, the choice for handgun-deprived criminals would be between nongun weapons (knives, clubs, etc.) and the relatively unregulated long guns (i....