Josh Marshall admits control doesn't work :
I think we should have dramatically tighter regulation of firearms in this country. Since we now seem to be dealing mainly with 'lone wolf' type terrorists, all the more reason not to have it be easy to buy military style rifles at the local Walmart.
But people intuitively grasp that a hardened extremist is not going to be deterred or stopped by the kinds of limited restrictions we are at all realistically talking about when it comes to gun control. Closing the gun show loophole ain't gonna do it. And we have the example of Paris, where terrorists managed to get AK-47s and rocket launchers in a country which severely restricts the private ownership of firearms. None of this is to say we just throw up our hands. Most counter-terrorism work is about placing lots of obstacles - most probably surmountable in and of themselves - to make attacks as difficult as possible, to create as many possible points of failure as possible.
The problem is that as those of us who've all but given up on the direction of firearms policy know, the 'gun control' debate has become perhaps the deadest and most ineffectual of them all.
Regulation as a religious act. Gun control doesn't work but Josh Marshall is for it.
