At Fox News: “March for Our Lives: Gun control ideas sound good, but are deeply flawed and won’t save lives”

Britain’s Guardian newspaper asked students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School for their ideas on how to end violence. The ideas sound good at first glance and are certainly well-meaning. But in reality, the policies being proposed will either have no effect or even cause harm.

Here are four of those ideas, and a look at their actual impact:

1. Ban semi-automatic weapons that fire high-velocity rounds.

Gun control advocates say semi-automatic rifles are designed to kill people, not for hunting, target practice or self-protection. They say only members of our military need these guns.

But looks can be deceiving. An AR-15 rifle shoots the same bullets as a small game-hunting rifle. Both guns fire one bullet at a time, and with the same velocity. The guns merely look different on the outside. AR-15s may resemble military weapons but they aren’t the same weapons used by soldiers.

Semi-automatic rifles don’t just take lives, they also deter criminal attacks and save lives. In 95 percent of defensive gun uses, no shots are fired. But if you do have to open fire, having a semi-automatic weapon means that you won’t have to take the time to manually reload the gun. This additional time for the victim may make the difference between life and death.

Banning all semi-automatic guns would endanger lives. So gun control advocates find it easier just to call for bans on the more scary-looking guns.

2. Require national registration of guns.

Gun control advocates have long claimed that gun registration will help solve crimes. Their reasoning is straightforward: A registered gun left at a crime scene can be used to identify the criminal.

Unfortunately, it rarely works out this way. Criminals almost never leave behind guns that are registered to them. In the few cases where guns are left at the scene, it is because the criminals were killed or injured. And these guns are virtually never registered to the person who committed the crime. Many are stolen.

During a 2013 deposition, the Washington, D.C., police chief said that she could not “recall any specific instance where registration records were used to determine who committed a crime.”

When I testified before the Hawaii State Senate in 2000, the Honolulu chief of police also stated that he couldn’t find any crimes that had been solved due to registration and licensing.

The chief also said that his officers spent about 50,000 hours each year on registering and licensing guns. This time is being taken away from traditional, time-tested law enforcement activities.

Canada and other parts of the U.S. haven’t had any better luck. TV shows depict gun registration as an effective crime-fighting tool, but this isn’t how things work in real life.

3. Institute universal background checks and close gun show and secondhand sales loopholes.

These are actually different words for the same thing. Background checks on private transfers of guns is the first policy gun control advocates call for after each mass public shooting. But such background checks would not have prevented a single mass public shooting in this century. . . .