You can’t have effective gun control in a free society.

Jim W makes an excellent observation in a comment over at SayUncle.

The main problem is that gun control people think that they can take guns out of the hands of criminals by passing laws.
[...]
Without prison type levels of control, you can’t effectively disarm people who don’t want to be disarmed. And even then, you are not going to have a foolproof success rate.

And if these measures barely work in prison (which is enormously expensive and the residents have no rights at all) it sure as hell isn’t going to work in a society where people have rights to privacy and not being searched, etc. You can’t have effective gun control in a free society. [emphasis mine.]

Think about it. In prisons - where the inmates are subject to detailed searches whenever the guards want, where their contact with the outside world is severely limited and constantly monitored, where their daily movements and activities are severely restricted and constantly monitored - prisoners still get weapons, and still kill other prisoners.

If we can't keep weapons out of prisons - the most restrictive environment we can create - there is simply no possibility of keeping them out of a free society.