A subjective perspective from outside the US:
If I follow your argument that illegal firearms are the problem, I still believe that the amount of illegal firearms in circulation is a direct function of the legal arms market’s size.
And as long as the threshold for acquiring a firearm is low, so is the threshold for injuring someone with one.
This goes for a criminal using an illegal one in a robbery, a frustrated teenager emptying their uncle’s poorly secured gun locker for a school schooting or even for suicides: An abundance of guns makes these things easier, so they happen more often.
Mandating stricter controls, safety training or weapon-lockup procedures can alleviate this some, but any process that relies on a lot of not strictly organized individuals to be applied will be fallible and permeable by nature.
Selling more weapons to private citizens will always lead to more gun-related deaths and injuries.
The only way to reliably reduce the amount of weapons in circulation is to sell less of them (and keep removing illegal ones).
Naturally, this is unpopular with an industry that relies on selling as many as possible.
(I’m also aware that something like this would have to be a very slow process. Even if the pool of legal weapons were drained overnight, all those illegal guns would still be around.)
Genuine question: Why not?
While the article indeed barely touched on its headline, the way I’ve seen the “suburb infrastructure upkeep problem” described seems indeed reminiscent of a ponzi scheme.
The way I understand it:
Suburbs have a relatively low initial cost (for the city) compared to the taxes they generate. However, their maintenance cost is relatively high because Suburbs are huge.
Thus, US cities have long had a policy of paying the rising cost of their older Suburbs by creating new Suburbs - which is pretty analogous to a Ponzi scheme.