But those two things are related. If you objectively increase the total number of firearms in a geographic location, it will be easier for people to get guns illegally.

How does a criminal get a gun? Well, they steal them. If you have more guns, they'll acquire more guns. And more guns means supply is increased vs a relative demand. That makes guns cheaper. So you end up with more guns on the black market, for cheaper.

The general Republican talking point is that more guns make us all safer. Well. It doesnt. We still stop a INCREDIBLY low number of home invasions with firearms, compared to how many happen. Most criminals dont want to die, so most criminals steal your guns when you're not home. So more guns arguably, makes us less safe collectively, while it makes individuals much more safe, while they have access to them, and are awake.

So you have these three forces all acting on each other. Total number of firearms, criminals desire for firearms, and a firearm being a way to stop bodily harm or theft.

Since you cant do anything about any of those forces existing, the idea, is to keep them in a balance.

You can probably draw a pretty simple correlation to the availability of firearms, and the propensity for their use, the same way you can tell if an African conflict is about to pop off when the price of an AK-47 drops below 50 USD. Cheap guns means over supply, over supply means a lot of people have guns, which means a lot of people are about to use their guns.

You need to balance the availability, with peoples right to defend themselves, with the criminals desire to get and use firearms. If one of those is out of whack, you start seeing mass violence and crime. Either because people cant defend themselves, you have too many guns, or people have a dramatically increased desire to murder each other.

If any of those things increase or decrease, you see the other forces move in an equal and opposite direction.

And I dont think they're entirely unstable. A human being needs to eat, sleep, shit, have a place out of the elements, and its totally rational to get those things by the path of least resistance for you. If thats a job, cool, if thats crime, well, thats what that person thought was the easiest thing to do. You cant know a persons circumstances and say that their risk assessment is so flawed it makes them crazy. If you have absolutely no prospects for a legal life, crime is probably the rational decision. And no rational person wants to die right? The same way you dont want to get shot by a robber, a robber doesnt want to get shot by a store clerk or the person theyre mugging. It was be irrational to try and mug someone without a weapon.

When you realize that most people are rational actors, its easier to understand these issues.

Of course the availability of firearms is tied to the amount of illegal guns. You have more guns, so criminals need more guns, so that means, you need more guns. Now the cops need more guns because we're all running around with guns. And theres no shortage of people to rob, or gun stores to buy more guns from, or police budget shortages to arm up the police to deal with us all chambering 7.62s and rocking drum mags.

Objectively speaking, if we want to reduce this paradigm or stop it, we need a lot less fucking guns.

I say this as an avid gun owner. We got too many fuckin guns.