//Then there would be the people who saw a quick buck in smuggling ammunition....hang on that wouldn't work, prohibition of grog was such a success, damn!//

No, prohibition isn't perfect and people do find black market solutions to get around it. But we still prohibit stuff, like smack, because policy makers seem to take the view that if we legalised it we'd wind up with more smackheads than we have under prohibition. They may well be right.

Banning the legal sale of ammunition won't stop it being sold on the black market. But it will reduce it's availability and increase it's price - if people have to pay through the nose for a single bullet it might encourage them to conserve their ammo by not shooting people unless it's absolutely necessary. Also, those that are caught buying and selling black-market ammo can be punished and have their ammo confiscated, which will hopefully deter others from doing likewise and stops at least one ammo-pusher from hawking his filthy wares.

There will still be ammo available, just as there is still smack available, but there won't be as much of it. An imperfect solution is better than throwing your hands in the air, declaring the problem intractable and not doing anything about it.

Hi Toni,

Yes, prohibition may work with many people, but perhaps precisely the 'wrong' ones: those who really want tovstock-pile ammunition might form yetanother readymarket for Mexican smugglers.

I'm intrigued by your suggestion that " .... the threat of scarcity might encourage them to conserve their ammo by not shooting people unless it's absolutely necessary." My heart goes out to all those people who don't shoot other people unless it's absolutely necessary, it must create many moral dilemmas for them.

Cheers,

Joe

Toni Lavis,

How many bullets do you figure a criminal needs and uses? Not many most would say. Think about it.

Next, criminals have little regard for laws and they do break laws. It is part of their modus operandi. For the drug-dealing gang member a weapon is one of the tools of trade.

They illegally procure and hold their guns with no difficulty at all. THe price of a box of ammunition is going to be a problem? How?

A car is more useful to an offender than a firearm and is usually a necessity.

Here is an idea, why not make fuel prohibitively expensive to stop those crims in their tracks? [sarcasm alert]

It is great to talk about gun control and avoid those thorny social problems, drug trafficking, gangs and so on.

Yay for that Obama, he did learn a lot from the master, Oz PM John Howard's advice, "It's the gun culture and do I have a deal for you. It's a hare called gun control, you just set it to run and they chase after it. Meanwhile you're home free, no problems. Well, no problems you'd care to discuss that is".

Nobody is ignoring our social problems OTB, but you (and others) do seem to be using them as a smokescreen for inaction on regulating inherently dangerous goods. This turn of argument doesn't quite make sense to me, you seem to be removing the gun problem from other problems and blaming it on those other social issues. I take the view that they are all parts of a wider more complex problem, and we can take action on all of them at once, not piecemeal. Guns, drugs and other issues can all have coordinated efforts at managing them. One problem is NOT an excuse to avoid tackling another.

In fact, many seem to be using our social problems as excuses for making it easier to obtain said weapons for the purposes of self-defence and not acknowledging that this is contributing to the loss of safety. Not so much in Australia, as Is Mise has shown, but certainly in the USA.

I know prohibition (at least in the long term) doesn't work, but we have done reasonably well at managing social problems before. Not ridding ourselves of them, but at least reducing their impacts.

Gun regulation is one of those methods. If there are serious anomalies in the legislation, then by all means, we should be able to streamline that. Those I am up for discussion about. But they have to be serious and real, perceived slights or insults on character don't count.

As an aside, still no numbers from you yet OTB?