I don’t think making legal guns more expensive would be the answer, I think the real answer is in making the process of getting the guns more rational, having accountability for gun sales through registration, the very things we in fact do with a car. 60% of the guns taken off the streets in big cities were bought legally in a handful of states, and if those guns were no longer available supply and demand would make the price in the black market such that the kind of low level punks who get them now wouldn’t be able to. Unfortunately, the rural, I’m gonna defend myself against the govn’ment, Zombie apocalypse types, rule the day, so in some states you can walk into a gun store, pass a minimal background check, fill up your car with guns, and go up one of the highways of death and dump them in a big city on the black market, no registration, no accountability. When they pull legal guns off the street and track it back to the person who bought it, there is no accountability, guy can shrug and say “must of been stolen”. If registration was part of it, there would be accountability, you have a gun, you register it, and if it goes missing or stolen, you have to report it, it is known as accountability. But somehow the very process we require for cars and boats by federal law doesn’t apply to guns (and don’t give me the second amendment, that only says you have the right to own guns, not that you have to be able to buy what you want, when you want, with absolute freedom, that is bs, no right has no burdens upon it, zero, nada, nilch…only outright bans on all guns are off the table).
We could have regulations with semi automatic hunting weapons, like the AR15, that limit the fire rate, the size of the magazine, and how easy it is to change it, that would have at the very least changed the dynamics of Newtown and Aurora, but we have too many backyard Rambos and militia types gonna fight the government to have that happen.
There is also an irony, if you look at crime stats, leaving out very rural states with small populations like the Dakotas, Wyoming and Montana, states with lax gun laws are up there on crime, especially violent crime involving guns, states like Florida, Texas, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and the like are up there in the top states for these kind of crimes, whereas states and cities with restrictive laws are not nearly there (my state, NJ, has ridiculously restrictive laws on guns, but we also have a relatively low violent crime rate, amazing given the density of population we have). Cities with high crime rates, like Baltimore and Chicago, also have a flood of guns on the black market, thanks to surrounding states with lax gun laws that allow legal guns to flow in. My answer about restrictions is if people want them for legitimate means, they should be allowed to own them, but on the other hand if they don’t want accountability for what happens with their guns, then it is obvious they have nefarious reasons, whether they want to be able to sell it to whoever for the highest price and walk away, or they are planning some other stupidity. If someone wants a gun to defend their house, for example, or wants a gun for sports shooting, why object to regulations similar to what we have owning a car? It is a pain in the butt to own a car, you have to have insurance, you have to have a driver’s license (as opposed to guns, where in most places you don’t have to have proof of any kind of training to own one), you have to register the car and renew it, and once you own it, you have accountability for it. We regulate things in cars, you can’t drive a tank on public roads, there are other limits, you can’t buy a race car and drive it on public streets, so why shouldn’t the type of guns be regulated with eyes on safety and such? You can’t buy a fully automatic weapon without a federal gun license legally, so why should people be able to buy semi automatic guns whose fire rate and reload capability is not that of a full automatic, but not slow by any means, we restrict automatics because of the kind of danger they hold, why can’t we regulate semi automatics so they don’t have rapid fire capability?
I personally think the whole having guns to defend oneself is overblown, when things like riots or natural disasters happen, even in Katrina, the reality is that the force of law comes back into play pretty rapidly. After Sandy, with the region crippled, we didn’t have widespread looting or problems with lawlessness, the cops and national guard were in place, and nothing happened in that way (and remember, this is a region with relatively few people owning guns, so that wasn’t the factor). That said, I also think people have the right to own guns, but I also think with that right comes responsibilities that they should have, they should be required to have safety training, they should be required to register the weapons and to have accountability for what happens with them. If a parent lets a kid get access to a loaded gun and the kid goes out and kills someone, the parent should be held responsible for not having the gun secured, the way they would if they left the keys in a car running and the kid drove off in it. This isn’t banning guns, it is mostly simply making sure that the legal purchashers of guns also have responsibility for them, pure and simple, and also making sure that the guns they are buying meet the needs of what they want them for. We don’t allow full automatic weapons for the most part, so we don’t have to allow access to weapons with fire rates that make no sense, the way fully automatic ones don’t.
As far as this one incident, there is no way to no if such laws would have prevented this, but if you take incidents like this as a whole, or gun violence as a whole, there is no doubt reasonable restrictions would prevent some of them, if not a lot of them.