Zaune wrote:Have you got a source for that? I don't know if any law-enforcement agencies keep statistics on this, but it's a reasonable supposition that a high percentage of the unlicensed firearms used in crimes were originally purchased legitimately before passing into other hands, with or without the consent of the original owner.
You're confusing me now, what do you want a source for? I was talking about poverty and if you want sources on that I can do some googling since I take this mostly from memory. About where guns are gotten from I have said nothing about, as it's not the source as much as the root cause of why these guns are wanted in the first place that's the interesting part, i.e. poverty, social problems, slums, drug wars, gang wars, just crushing desperate poverty driving people into violent crime and drug abuse coupled with a prison system that turns them into even more hardened criminals.
As for poverty & crime, a christian site but whatever:
Poor people make up the overwhelming majority of those behind bars as 53% of those in prison earned less than $10,000 per year before incarceration.
http://www.capaassociation.org/newslett ... yCrime.htm
Also, another factor, the US prison system itself:
There is good reason to fear that minority men are severely at risk in the criminal justice system. 71% of all "3 strike" offenders in California prisons are African Americans or Latino Americans. What is worse, these men are all serving 25 to life sentences. Unbelievably, many of these men are serving these life sentences for petty theft and minor drug offenses. Offenses such as these are common among the poor. So common in fact that minority people suffer imprisonment wildly disproportional to their numbers in the general population.
http://www.pubdef.ocgov.com/poverty.htm
This is just the recipe for creating massive social problems, and look where we are now.
Incidentally, you might be interested to learn that a .38 pocket revolver on the black market in Britain costs about $500, a Glock closer to $750. Not a lot of crooks and basket-cases can afford that.
Thats what new semi automatic pistols usually cost in america, 500 and up. That's why there is an industry making "drop guns", cheap shitty guns for the poor (jennings, lorcin, etc.), called drop guns because you can discard it after using it without much economic penalty, well unless you're poor then even the 60-70 bucks they cost might be a lot.
I should also clarify that before when I said euro countries I have excluded the UK, referring mostly to continental europe & scandinavia.
