I've been advocating this since, like, forever. The best way to deal with crimes committed by gun-toting criminals is to put gun-toting criminals behind bars for very long periods of time. You target the people who cause the problem.

The possession of guns by the law-abiding is not a problem, nor can it be said in any reasonable way to contribute to crime.

Bart:

To some extent we do this; this is why you see odd stories about (relatively) clever robbers robbing banks or stores with fake guns - they're quite aware that the penalties are more severe if actual guns are used.

It's a shame that reasonable academics have been forced to construct sociological "models" in order to confirm what was once called common sense. The muddle headed argument offered by opponents of freedom and responsibility have brought us to this point. Too bad logic and factual analysis have little impact on the foes of ordered liberty.

That's because they're Such Superior Intellects (TM).

Why do you think their favorite name for themselves is "Brights"?

As George Orwell once wrote, there are some things so stupid that they can only be believed by an intellectual.
Mark Twain-- recent scholarly research has shed much darkness on this topic, and as the work goes forward, soon all will be unknown.

Ack! to clarify, I am not knocking this guy, but rather, the lefty "scholars" who aim to prove that gun control works, that guns somehow kill people independent of human action, etc. Thank God there is a bit of a trend to sanity by John Lott, Don Kates, this author, etc.

I suggest that we not waste our time looking for logic or consistency in leftist positions. These bourgiouse affectations mean less than nothing to them.

Their antiparty to weapons has three bases. First, they have an historical and emotional reaction to a myth of the gun as the cause of Western and American power. We should be proud and satisfied that they have bought our spiel hook, line and sinker. So they simply don't like guns, and they don't much like people who are associated with guns, e.g. you and me.

The second basis for their hatred and fear of privately owned weapons is tactical. The RKBA blunts one of their major tools for control of society. The leftist paradigm for change is for the intelligensia to seize control of the state and use it to transform society. Our fear of and need of protection from violent crime tends to make us dependent of the state for our very existence and thus more willing to grant the state more and more power over our lives. You can always get more taxes for police and prisons. Privately owned weapons limit their ability to use "socially friendly elements" (criminals) to aggrandize state power.

Another factor along the same lines is that the gun culture contributes to a more robust foreign policy. We tend to have that swagger that, according to President Bush, is known in Texas as "walking."