CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: I think we’re going to end up exactly where we started. We’re probably going to try an assault weapons ban and it will be a little bit tighter, but it didn’t work. The numbers on it — it lasted for ten years, in the mid-nineties, and the statistics on it [showed] it had no affect. And the reason is simple, if we had an honest debate the gun owners would admit that yes, of course the guns contribute to homicide. The rate in Britain, where they don’t have any, is 10 times as much as here, Japan had 11 gun homicides last year — that’s a weekend in Chicago.

Where we are different, we have a 200 year history and culture of gun ownership. And we have a Second Amendment, and we have a system that believes the rights — the Second Amendment in other words — predate the republic.

And the point of having a government, as in the Declaration, is to secure the rights. In Britain, you have no such right; the government will control gun ownership. So unless you are willing to confiscate — which would be unconstitutional and would cause insurrection in the country — as Australia did, these things will not have an effect, except at the margins. And that’s the tragedy here.

Source:  Real Clear Politics (video)