system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5:How will stricter gun laws prevent shootings in the US?
gpt
Ooohh boy. Doozy of a question. 

To answer it specifically: According to gun control advocates, making guns harder to purchase or more strictly regulating specific types of firearms will make it harder for the criminally-inclined to obtain and use them in the commission of crimes. 

The honest truth is that it is a century too late for these kinds of rules to have any kind of immediate effect. There are so many privately owned guns- both legal and illegal- already in existence, this would not have much immediate effect on gun crime, especially considering that guns have a shelf-life of 200+ years. They don't expire. The millions of guns out there are still going to be out there even if all gun ownership was banned outright today. In effect, strict gun control laws today would have zero effect on the millions of already-existing guns out there while largely preventing law-abiding people from purchasing them. Super-strict, UK or East Asian-style gun control *can* work, but it has to be implemented wholly and relatively early in a nation's development. The cat's out of the bag here in the US in 2015.