Well it is hard to really guess what the net effect of removing all guns, or all non-cop/mil guns would have on homicide rates and also on crime rates in general, I don't like to take as a given we'd see some massive across the board drop, but that's another conversation. We have very sketchy data on crime prevention from guns, just crimes involving them.

In this context though the recent gun control measures relate to mass killings, spree/bomb/etc though not serial killings which usually aren't with guns. Thus we talk about controlling semi-automatic weapons and magazine capacity. When we leave the zone of spree killing magazine size becomes pretty irrelevant, as does rate of fire. Most gun homicides involve only one or a few shots being fired. Ditto, suicides and accidents involving guns seriously outnumber homicides with guns and those really have nothing to do with the weapon's magazine capacity or even its type, except insofar as it is generally easier to have an accident with a pistol.

We can discuss gun legislation in regards to lowering overall gun homicides but the simple reality is that those are very different circumstances overall than those applying to mass murder. It's hard to effectively manage regular homicides via restrictions on weaponry, since the leading cause of murder is personal conflict, and fully a third of homicides don't involve firearms, it is a big jump to assume banning them would eliminate 2/3rds of those, or even most of those 2/3rds. More importantly none of the currently suggested measures would impact those. Take a man's gun away and he might be less likely to kill his best friend and lover when he catches them together, or he might beat them to death with a tire iron, regardless restricting him to a 10 round clip or revolver isn't likely to save them.

Now, background checks... yeah, those might help some. But people forget, a background check will only keep the gun out of the hand - even if it works perfectly - of someone who has not yet been convicted of a felony. I remember one of the more BS gun violence stats which insisted how many criminals had guns which didn't bother to point out that many of them were only convicted of crimes after acquiring the gun, often the crime in question involving that gun. A very important statistic (good luck finding it) for this conversation is "What percentage of gun homicides are committed by people who have previously been convicted of a felony?".

You will be able to find what percentage of violent crimes have been committed by people with previous criminal records but nobody I've seen have that specific data, which is the important one. I can tell you that it won't be very high, not small, but not too high.

I also want to take a moment to raise another of those unpopular but important points, which the left doesn't touch because it dislikes guns and the right because it dislikes felons, which is: Exactly how moral and fair is it to permanently remove the right to own a gun (or vote) from someone because they committed a felony? I'm not the sort to weep for the lost rights of felons but I continue to have problems with the general notion that we release people on the notion they are reformed and then don't treat them that way. If you don't give them an option for full restoration of rights and privileges it seems to me you are in a very bizarre moral area, especially for non-violent felonies.

But point being that the legislation kicked around has two primary components, owner control and gun-type control, the latter at least is only valid in regard to spree killings... to a degree so is the former, we don't usually have ex-cons committing spree murders, to my knowledge most of these mass killings are done by those with no felony convictions. This is why we keep harping on the ineffectiveness aspect of these regs. When we can actually point to how a specific spree killing might not have occurred with a piece of the current suggested law, which is rare, there's still the exclusivity aspect. Which is to say that it is a big jump to assume that a crime committed with an AR-15 would not have occurred if they were outlawed, and homemade bombs stick themselves on the scales weighing against gun control preventing mass murder.