Wait, now the mission creep has spread to gun violence in general? I thought this was specifically for combating the threat to schools and other gatherings from lone psychotic gunmen?
The overwhelming majority of murders with guns (not that it is any less murder if a dagger or other weapon is used) are directly related to drug gangs. Crystal Meth, Crack Cocaine, Heroin and even cannabis, huge profitable markets totally unregulated put fast amounts of money in the hands of the utterly unscrupulous, they don't have cops to back up their "business" they sort it out with their guns through endless cycles of reprisal murders.
People aren't outraged by the city morgue slowly overflowing with the bodies of young men from disadvantage backgrounds killed in gang disputes. It is the combination of poverty, socio-racial segregation of communities and the lucrative drug trade that is driving the murder rate in the United States. Ban guns as they'll fire with blades. It's not like in all the strife and recriminations of Medieval Europe it was a land of peace simply because the gun hadn't been invented yet. No, they had things like the Crusades.
And I think the US government wants to be very careful accusing video games of violence as it's not like Call of Duty was the inspiration for The War on Terror, IT WAS THE OTHER WAY AROUND! They looked at what the US government is ACTUALLY doing, what is seen on the news, of them going into other countries and getting into massive bloody conflicts... oh but it's suddenly the video games problem because they depicted that.
Violence has NOT skyrocketed in Australia since the gun bans, that was a hoax. There was a falsified set of statistics that claimed so which was published by the American NRA, but the federal attourney general of the time called them out on it.
EDIT: Fixed quote issue
True, overall gun deaths have been falling... at a steady rate since 1979 with the state of gun laws an irrelevance. The rate of gun deaths was going down regardless of legislation.
But those are broad statistics, the actual people one the front line will tell a different story, consider how "gun deaths" inexplicably also include suicide by firearm, accidents and legal self-defence. Which can skew the result we are really looking for: murders overall, and how the legal status of guns changes that.
How has the ban changed the impression of actual Australian Law enforcement? Is it now like Britain where the police no longer even want guns? No. The Australian police have turned in their sidearms as unnecessary due to the effectiveness of the gun-ban in disarming murderers and reduced gun crime in general. No, they have UPGRADED their firepower from revolvers to high capacity Glocks, the very weapons they banned as unnecessary they know PETITION ARE NECESSARY!
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/police-want-more-firepower/story-e6frf8qo-1111116019976
Surely what should naturally follow a gun ban is the police no longer need guns themselves. Now they say 6 shots isn't enough, they need 18-round capacity firearms. That's 3x the capacity and a heck of a lot faster effective rate-of-fire.
A revealing quote from a police officer:
"Then you use a firearm and you are scrutinised and hanged in the media.
"We need semi-auto pistols. Why are we not important enough to not have the best equipment available to protect ourselves?"
Not more important? No, you are already way higher in importance being allowed to even touch ANY sort of handgun, and you criticise being scrutinised in the same way that all other legitimate gun owners were.
And it's not like military and police are automatically trustworthy. I read in the paper this morning about the trial of a British Sailor who went on a spree killing with his issued assault rifle, only unlikely chance stopped him shooting more than 2 people. The worst lone individual killing spree (outside of wars like WWII) was committed by a police officer in South Korea:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woo_Bum-kon
Interestingly no police force in the world has used this as an example of why they should disarm themselves, even after they have disarmed the general population.
No, their response was to have better guns and firearms capability to stop spree killers sooner.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luby%27s_massacre
Here the public responded with demanding LIBERAL gun laws, from how patrons who survived the rampage protested that they would have shot the killer with guns they owned specifically to protect themselves, but the law forbade them carrying them... a law that's utterly pointless when the perpetrator is already resigned to commit murder and suicide, what would any legal deterrent of carrying a gun concealed be? The "no gun zone" doesn't affect precisely the people it is designed to affect, spree murderers.