jackk: Restricting non-criminals from gun ownership (what the Democrats are proposing) will in no way hamper criminals. Similarly, disarming or abolishing the police (another focus of much of the Democratic policy) will not result disarming or abolishing criminals. American culture is a function of 400 years of immigration policies which recruited large number of criminals (flee arrest/execution in their homelands) and rebels fed up with aristocratic societies (such of those in Europe) in which the elites had a monopoly on power and used it to ripoff everyone else.
Gun control would probably work well in countries with a long tradition of people accepting their place in society and being content to be ruled over by an elite which has a monopoly on power including gun ownership. For the most part, those who wanted to be rid of being ruled over have long ago packed the bags for the “wild west” of American, and left their sheepish cousins behind.
The bottom line is you can’t undo 400 years of cultural evolution by legislative fiat, and the US should accept its gun culture as something that can’t be easily changed and concentrate on disarming criminals and mentally ill persons and follow the “red state” solution (usually ignored in left wing media) of allowing armed citizens to shoot would be mass killers before they can do much harm.