You can’t have effective gun control in a free society.
Jim W makes an excellent observation in a comment over at SayUncle.

Quoted, linked, and expounded on.

The way you disarm criminals is by searching them for weapons when they enter prison. And you can’t do that without knowing what crime they have committed and then arresting and trying them for it. It’s hard work but it’s the only thing that has any effect.

Without prison type levels of control, you can’t effectively disarm people who don’t want to be disarmed. And even then, you are not going to have a foolproof success rate.

And if these measures barely work in prison (which is enormously expensive and the residents have no rights at all) it sure as hell isn’t going to work in a society where people have rights to privacy and not being searched, etc. You can’t have effective gun control in a free society.

We never said it was a secret. Their campaign to end gun ownership was wide open for anyone to see and was never anything but an openly stated goal.

This is not entirely true. While some members of the anti-gun movement have been open and honest, other parts are deliberately deceptive. Just look at what the Joyce Foundation did behind the scenes to fundamentally undermine 2nd Amendment legal scholarship for one example.

Um, No, it’s an inalienable rights issue.

I’ve met Petey. He’s not a bad guy; I sometimes wonder if he really believes the crap he’s selling–but I have to wonder about his sanity when I read that sentence about there being no secret conspiracy.

We never said it was a secret. Their campaign to end gun ownership was wide open for anyone to see and was never anything but an openly stated goal. What Heller said was that that in plain view campaign wasn’t going to be allowed.

You say dumb shit like that when your cause and raison d’etre is eliminated and gutted utterly in one stroke of the pen by the men in robes.

I say we call Brady’s bluff: “Ok, since you openly admit that national gun control laws don’t make sense, why don’t you spend all your time and money lobbying state legislatures instead of Congress?”

It’s a problem that’s hard to solve. In criminal law, we take the view that it’s better that a guilty person go free than an innocent man be imprisoned; it seems like the same logic should apply. However, I doubt you’ll find many who would ban guns who also want the burden of proof in criminal cases reduced to a lower standard.

Of course, the problem with this scorched-earth strategy of making a wasteland and calling it peace is that it doesn’t work. If it works as intended, you leave the weak at the mercy of the strong. If it doesn’t, and this is more likely, you wind up with our current situation of criminals having guns and decent people not.

If someone breaks in my house, I need to be able to protect my family.

That should apply in the city as well as in the country.