While there will be some gun restrictions in the coming years, most Americans will insist on keeping most of the current gun laws. And as Prohibition and drug laws prove, if people want something bad enough, government cannot stop it.
I'm glad you accept that there will be new gun laws. Though the trend currently is towards less.
And I really wish the analogy between guns and drugs was sound. Because I see a bright future for drug laws, in which people who have a problem with drugs are quickly and cheaply diverted to treatment programs.
But it's not a sound analogy. The victims of drugs are
drug users themselves. We just need services available (and even pushed somewhat) for them to flip over to seeing their addiction as a problem. Guns are somewhat like this, in the aspect of suicide, but suicide is a far more advanced state of poor judgement, than being stoned on a Monday and losing ones job. Catching suicides is harder harder than catching people who know they have a drug problem. And then there's the far more morally troubling problem of murder.
Murderers are immensely more irresponsible than drug addicts. How does the law catch a potential murderer, when the causes aren't just "has a gun" but also their first love divorced them and went with someone else? Or the guy who bullied them in school, joined a rival gang? Or they respond really badly to white guys staring them down?
The causes of murder are varied, and almost always irrational. We lack the universal psychological insight to know who is going to murder who. I mean, it's convenient to say that every murderer is de facto insane: it IS insane to take such a risk with one's own freedom. But we can't know in advance. The cross-section of potential murderers we would have to give fortnightly psych appointments to, is far to wide for our resources, and furthermore they would not co-operate because only people who know they have a problem, and actively want help, co-operate with psychiatrists or psychologists.
We must do more in getting psych services to those who are willing. But let's not pretend it's the silver bullet. No one thing is going to solve the massive problem of
potentially dangerous people
already having a gun, when they decide to do something stupid.
Gun control isn't the silver bullet either. If tests and licensing put a dent in the "right of passage to adulthood" culture of gun ownership though, fewer young men would buy a gun "just in case" and fewer bad cases would occur. Gangsters aside, there are a wide class of murderers who are opportunistic, they make an irrational choice based on emotion. If they didn't already have a gun, but had to go through formalities to get it, it might make them think twice.
Of course, to our gun rights members, this will seem like "infringing." Yes, I guess it is. But they largely accept the infringement of background checks, they agree with keeping guns out of the hands of convicted criminals. It's not such a big step to also keep guns out of the hands of people who are prone to later become criminals. Those people are making the truly law-abiding gun owners, look bad.