It's very true that lawful constraints constrain the lawful. Another thing to consider is - and this gets brought up often but still not often enough - that the expedient gun-violence narrative is 'mentally ill white kid with a semi-automatic rifle', but based on what data we have (which, again, isn't as much as we'd like to have) the single most likely shooter/weapon combination to kill me is myself, with a handgun. Nearly two-thirds of annual gun deaths in the US are self-inflicted, and the vast majority of annual gun deaths in the US are at the business end of semi-automatic handguns. So yeah, banning whatever old media wants to call "assault weapons" this week will cause a statistically significant reduction in whatever old media wants to call "mass shootings" this week. But it'll be a fart in a tornado when it comes to putting a dent in gun violence in America.
