Ha!

Paris (AFP) – Gun deaths in the United States can be slashed by over 90 percent through universal application of laws requiring background checks of buyers and easy tracing of every bullet fired, researchers said Thursday.

Conducting a background check on every single gun buyer could more than halve the national gun death rate from 10.35 to 4.46 per 100,000 people, said a paper in The Lancet medical journal.

Background checks for all ammunition purchases would cut the rate to 1.99 per 100,000 people, and “firearm identification” to 1.18 per 100,000.

Firearm identification requirements oblige manufacturers to store images of the unique markings that every gun makes on the bullets it fires, for cartridges at crime scenes to be easily traced to the gun that fired them, and hence its owner.

So if we shred the Constitution and have universal gun registration and a massively expensive infrastructure for the testing and identification of all fired bullets (which already failed in Virginia for obvious reasons), we will be able to lower the number of murderous criminals who use guns?!?!? Great!

Oh, but not really…

But the authors conceded that once laws are implemented, they could take “many years” to start having the desired effect.

Commenting on the study, David Hemenway of the Harvard School of Public Health said the authors had failed to calculate the potential impact of factors like poverty, alcohol consumption and mental health.

And the study was unable to examine actual changes in gun deaths before and after the passing of any given law.