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Ok so... i'm often seriously confused about what safety people actually care about.
I understand fear of handguns a handgun is an easy to procure object in a hurry that allows someone to commit a crime suddenly and violently.
But it seems any type of premediatated or planned operation is just super legal and easy to get? (except of course using it to commit a crime is obviously very illegal)
Nitromethane is freely available for purchase, which can be easily made into very dangerous chemicals using stuff you can buy in the hardware store. From there we have other things, while you have to either break the law or DIY it for a lot of parts you can make your own drone (or just use a kids RC helicopter toy, seriously it may not work for heavy payloads but you'd be shocked at how far you can go with mediocre toys these days.) and drop an explosive on anyone. You can also make actual war crimes in your basement by mixing iron powder, and sulfur then heating it, sealing it in a glass bottle with water as it builds up H2S. Alternatively if you want to make cyanide gas, buying sodium cyanide (i'd be willing to post links but I don't want this forum to actually get in trouble with the FBI, I already got searched once) and mixing it with sulfiric acid is doable (and ok like hyper dangerous beyond belief and you would have to basically get rid of it the moment you make it but....)
Again the delivery mechanisms for this stuff isn't complicated and the main limiting factor of these does not appear to be that obtaining the means of violence is hard it's that anyone smart enough to do this is also smart enough to realize that violence is a bad idea.
A handgun is a very convenient tool for the casual homicide. You don't have to be smart to use it, and it is a minimal inconvenience to carry it around while you go about your daily business until one day, you decide that someone needs to die (or be stopped from whatever he is doing) and can enact your decision within a few seconds.
There are plenty of other tools which can be used for murder in a pinch, you can use screwdrivers to stab someone, or hit them with a blunt object, or run them over with your car, or pierce them with sharpened Hufflepuff students' bones.
If a reasonably smart person wants to off her neighbor and does not care about the consequences to herself, she will probably find a way to do so. Most likely, it will not involve any flashy homebrewed chemicals. (H2S is a terrible choice in particular because humans can detect it in trace amounts and find it deeply unpleasant, and having your victim inhale HCN is difficult unless you have trapped them in a gas chamber.)
Of course, if she cares about not getting caught, she will most likely use a method which is already common (such as handguns), because anything clever and original will exclude 95% of the suspects immediately.
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.)
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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