>>>You will drive up the price, but not too much. You are tweaking the wrong side of economics. Make carrying such a gun or keeping it on premise a crime. Make any crime using a military grade weapon a higher risk by driving up sentences via mandatory addition.In case self defense was done with a military weapon and the weapon cannot be explained legally, make a case. Do searches for the weapons ONLY, not trying to make a case if anything else was found - searches without a warrant might cause less problems then.
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>>If draconian sentencing was a solution to crime the USA should be virtually crime free by now.
>>Harsh sentencing doesn't work. Its a sop to those who think it will and will vote for someone who recommends it.
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>I sometimes wonder about US sentencing (more about the civil suits...) but am not close enough to even have ideas about basic distribution parameters of sentences for a given crime. But if economic scaling of sentence with seriousness of crime does not work you can either stop the judicial process right now or try to change via Darwinian methods.

Do you really think criminals ponder the length of the sentence before they commit a crime. I don't think they're that quite joined up mentally. My POV is that prison is there to remove the real psychopaths from the street. The prison population should be much smaller (this applies in the UK BTW) but the people in there would probably be there for a very long time.