>>It's obvious to me that if there were no guns, no criminals would have guns.

Sadly that's not going to be possible. The Irish showed how easy it is to stash disallowed weapons and the US has far more firearms than Ireland ever had.

FWIW, a lot of gun control jurisdictions out there don't ban weapons altogether. To hold a firearm in many Western nations you may need as little as a blessing from local Police and somewhere safe to store the firearms. They may come and inspect.

That's for rifles and shot guns. For automatic weapons, most places are with you: civilians don't need automatic weapons. And then there's handguns. A lot of places have quite stringent controls over handguns, e.g. requiring membership of specialist gun clubs and a quota of formal competitions to justify holding one.

The result is that if a crim does something with a firearm- it's a lot easier to track down where it came from. Even if the serial is filed off.

Not sure it would work in the US where there will be weapons trickling out of stashes forever.