Tighter laws have been proven to be worthless, for example in NYC you need a license to even hold a handgun and it takes from a few weeks to a few months of meticulous checks to get the license. Yet criminals in NYC such as muggers etc are armed with pistols, I am pretty sure they didn't bother to get the proper license to own said pistols. A ban also wouldn't magically make those "mugger pistols" disappear. The sheer number of guns in the US is mind boggling, I remember reading about an Dept of Justice estimate that just in NYC there are about a million+ unregistered handguns. Wrap your head around that, at least a million.