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Very true. When you work in the criminal justice system you will often have a sort of yo-yo on your positions on gun control as you see more and more gun crime. Initially you will see something like an armed robbery gone wrong and think gun control sounds pretty good. The fact is that most criminals do not have grand criminal plans, everything is basically a crime of opportunity, and disarming people in those situations would be a social good.
But then you realize those people just get guns anyways. Even after they are convicted felons. And you realize the only people who ever actually face consequences for violating gun laws are 45 year old tow truck drivers who use a revolver to stop a 20 year old punk from attacking him because he's towing the car the punk parked in a tow zone.
I would argue that it is somewhat harder in Germany to buy an illegal handgun than in the US, not that I have tried either, personally.
A lot of legal guns being in circulation makes it easy to steal them. I expect you need to break perhaps into 10 cars and search the glove compartments until you find a gun in the US. In Germany, you might have to break into 1000 cars instead because not only is gun ownership rare, legal owners are also required to keep their guns locked up. Not that this helps too much, you can probably still source illegal weapons from Eastern Europe. (I would expect most smugglers not to deal in illegal guns, because the risk-to-profit ratio is much worse than for drugs. If you sell 10k$ worth of cocaine, you can reasonably expect that the authorities will never find out, and if they do, they might have resigned to the fact that there will always be someone selling cocaine. If you sell 10k$ worth of handguns, your average customer will be someone who just likes to own a gun to feel manly or a drug dealer who wants a backup plan (but has no plans to shoot anyone), but chances are much higher that someone will use them in some flashy crime, and the eye of Sauron will fall on you.)
If you're interested, there's plenty of actual research on the supply chains for criminals to get their guns. The US could choose to crack down on these supply chains, and gun rights groups often support doing this, without affecting normie joe sixpack gun owner very much(the growth in concealed carry has drastically reduced the number of handguns left in cars; most guns used in crime are currently straw purchased, just like how teenagers get alcohol). This is never a popular proposition, because no one involved in the gun control debate in the US really cares about crime.
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One in three USAian adults owns a gun. (Naturally, this proportion varies wildly between states, and probably between areas within states.) Therefore, your estimate that one in ten USAian cars contains a gun implies that one in three USAian gun owners leaves a gun in his car (rather than in his domicile or on his person) all the time. IMO, that's rather high. Why would a person buy an entire extra gun just to leave it in his car?
Some people have long guns in their car almost all the time. But they dont have much interaction with the criminal elements we are currently discussing. And you sure as hell don't want to be caught by one of them breaking into said truck.
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