Las Vegas Shooting

[Broomstick]

That doesn't explain why such systems are legal, it just brings up the problem of enforcing a proposed ban.

[Civil War Man]

I don’t even know where to start with silencers.

Because silencers aren't like the movies and aren't actually silent? Cause it's still noticeably a gunshot? Cause all that does is make it less loud so you don't need to wear ear protection? So yeah, why would someone want something that makes it more comfortable to shoot?

Based on accounts I've read of the attacks, people were eventually able to figure out where the shots were coming from based on the noise and muzzle flashes. Silencer is a bit of a misnomer, but if it makes the gun quiet enough for the shooter to not require ear protection, it makes it quiet enough that the people he's targeting are going to have a harder time figuring out where the shots are coming from, especially if the shooter is firing from, say, the 32nd floor of a nearby building. Every additional second required to trace the origin of the gunfire in a mass shooting is more people dead or injured.

[Ziggy Stardust]

I'm really sick of hearing the chicken-shit argument that "Oh, well, he probably got those guns illegally, therefore this has zero bearing on gun control as an issue." How do people think the illegal gun marketplace works? That there are just magic factories mass producing illegal guns for a market that exists in parallel to and in isolation from the legal gun industry? How fucking stupid do you have to be to actually believe this?

[Beowulf]

That doesn't explain why such systems are legal, it just brings up the problem of enforcing a proposed ban.

Rule of law is degraded when you have unenforceable laws.

I'm really sick of hearing the chicken-shit argument that "Oh, well, he probably got those guns illegally, therefore this has zero bearing on gun control as an issue." How do people think the illegal gun marketplace works? That there are just magic factories mass producing illegal guns for a market that exists in parallel to and in isolation from the legal gun industry? How fucking stupid do you have to be to actually believe this?

There isn't much of a illegal manufacturing industry in the US (in part, because homebuilt guns are usually legal). But that doesn't apply in other countries where it is much more difficult. And it turns out that the illegally manufactured guns in those other countries tend to be machineguns when built from scratch (as opposed to converted from non-guns). That's in part because open bolt guns are stupid easy to make, especially if you don't care about rifling the things.

[Mr Bean]

That doesn't explain why such systems are legal, it just brings up the problem of enforcing a proposed ban.

Writing such a ban so it does not also ban things like internal combustion engines, pinball machines and table saws is the issue. The recoil sping is including in all sorts of things runs into the issue that there are very similar designs in lots of existing products. The fact someone made a gun mounting is the only change.

[Lonestar]

Reducing the number of weapons in the United States significantly would make owning 20+ rifles and hundreds (possibly thousands) of rounds of ammo something to take note of. It wouldn't be perfect, after all, Canada still does have shootings though these shootings are often gang on gang violence along with unfortunate bystanders of such attacks.

Generally speaking, Bubba with 20 ARs in his closet is a significantly smaller problem than someone who has one or two guns and shoots his wife. About 3% of the population owns half the guns in the country.

It isn't the guys with big ass collections that are the problem.

[Lonestar]

Silencer is a bit of a misnomer, but if it makes the gun quiet enough for the shooter to not require ear protection, it makes it quiet enough that the people he's targeting are going to have a harder time figuring out where the shots are coming from, especially if the shooter is firing from, say, the 32nd floor of a nearby building.

Unless you have something quasi-exotic like .300 Blackout where the only sound is a bolt slap, most silencers and cartridges aren't "hearing safe". The silencer on my AR reduces the sound to a mere jackhammer.

[Beowulf]

Silencer is a bit of a misnomer, but if it makes the gun quiet enough for the shooter to not require ear protection, it makes it quiet enough that the people he's targeting are going to have a harder time figuring out where the shots are coming from, especially if the shooter is firing from, say, the 32nd floor of a nearby building.

Unless you have something quasi-exotic like .300 Blackout where the only sound is a bolt slap, most silencers and cartridges aren't "hearing safe". The silencer on my AR reduces the sound to a mere jackhammer.

Beyond that, silencers will only reduce the sound from the combustion gases. It won't reduce the sound from the bullet going supersonic.

[Simon_Jester]

Oh, added note cause he purchased weapons in Vegas. Learn how to modify, then buy the weapons in Vegas themself. Now you don't have to transport them.

Getting them in still requires a little thought, but still, easily doable.

Honestly, I doubt he had any real worries about transporting guns from Mesquite, Texas or wherever to Las Vegas. They'd be in his car, and it's not like we have checkpoints on the interstate highways opening up everyone's cars to find contraband. The only part of the trip where he'd be in real danger of detection would have been in Las Vegas, because of time spent setting up. Buying the weapons there wouldn't necessarily help make that safer for him.

My understanding is that he used AK=patter rifles, not ARs. Rob Pincus on Instagram had a fellow firearms instructor at the concert and he thought it was 7.62x39.

So he brings up a separate suitcase full of ammo. Big deal. I'm pretty sure you could load more rounds in a suitcase than the average 62-year-old man could carry, anyway. [shrugs]

And to add: If the system failed then it’s clear that no private citizen should own fully automatic weapons. At least it is to me, someone who isn’t willing to see 58 (at last count) killed and over 400 (at last count) injured by one guy so that a few hundred (or thousand) people across the country can have toys to play with. And before you bring up the Oklahoma City Bombing, ammonium nitrate became tracked and regulated in an attempt to prevent it from happening again.

If this guy used illegally modified weapons then a possible solution to something like this happening again could be to monitor and regulate the sale and stockpiling of ammunition.

Because you may be willing to just throw up your hands and say “It’s a trajedy, the system has failed” while casting aspersions at those of us sick of hearing about how it’s a tragedy the system failed every couple years (or less), but I’m not.
I’m wanting to do things to make the system better so it won’t fail, or at least mitigate the failures.

If that makes me a fucking idiot on the moral high ground then I’m proud to be one.

By the way, how many preventable deaths per year have to result from a given cause for you to feel more strongly about it than you do about gun control? I'm informally polling here, so I'm curious.

While an interesting notion, would this permit fire fast enough to approximate the sound of an automatic?

Also, for obvious reasons, this would require a certain amount of pre-planning and practice. I would not be surprised if, for at least some time after this incident, people requesting specific rooms are asked a few pointed questions about why, particularly if said rooms face popular venues from a high position.

Because they like the view?

I mean, a LOT of high-rise hotels have suites and rooms that overlook big chunks of the city skyline, or public locations. They often specifically choose sites that give 'room with a view' options.

If the killer was able to modify otherwise legal weapons to make them fully automatic, or even just even just shoot the things off as has been suggested via "bumpfire", then this is a big problem that only gun control can solve, and it seems to me difficult to solve without some actions the American people would probably think too draconian. I'd never heard of "bumpfire" before, but after having Googled the thing, it seems to me that if fully automatic weapons are too dangerous for civilians to own, then semi-automatic weapons which can be converted into fully automatic (or effectively simulate fully automatic fire) are too dangerous for civilians to own. I just don't know how to do that, other than say "Sorry, you can't have it."

What do you expect to happen in the US if this is tried, from a consequentialist viewpoint?

[Lonestar]

Saw a(alleged) picture of a Daniel Defense AR with a bumpfire stock recovered. I suspect a ATF Legal Opinion Letter that this constitutes conversion to a MG will arrive this year.

[Simon_Jester]

Reducing the number of weapons in the United States significantly would make owning 20+ rifles and hundreds (possibly thousands) of rounds of ammo something to take note of. It wouldn't be perfect, after all, Canada still does have shootings though these shootings are often gang on gang violence along with unfortunate bystanders of such attacks.

What we don't have are mass shootings, this single attack equals the amount of deaths caused by mass shootings in Canada going back to '99 ('96 if we remove 8 deaths in a gang related mass murder). The worst firearms related instance of mass murder going back to the 1900's is 15 deaths in 1989. The lack of firearms likely plays some part in this even if there are other factors at play.

I think the other factors may be playing a lot harder than the guns.

As an example of a class of violent crime in which guns very rarely make an appearance, consider the rape rates in Canada and the US. Guns are not commonly used in rapes, precisely because the stereotypical "armed stranger" rape scenario is so uncommon.

Now, Canada has a vastly lower gun crime rate than the US. But Canada also has a reported rape rate of somewhere between one and two cases per hundred thousand, whereas in the US it's more like 30 or 40.

Now, there are obvious confounders here. Rape rates are underreported in every country, because many or most victims don't go to the police. But at the same time, this is true in every country, and there's no obvious reason that rape victims in Canada should be, say, ten times less likely to go to the police than they are in the US. While we can't draw firm numerical conclusions, we can at least say that it sure looks as though Canada's rape rate is a lot lower than the US's, maybe as little as 1/10 the rate in the US. And this almost has to be caused by reasons other than guns.

This is not to say gun proliferation has literally zero effect on crime and murder rates. But clearly the picture is much, MUCH more complicated than "lol just ban guns."

The US is pretty much unique here in having both random crazy berserkers and a lot of guns. The guns might be influencing the type of violence, but it's debatable whether they're the actual underlying problem. Me, I think the problem is whatever is causing Americans to go murderously insane without psychiatric treatment or community support.. Maybe the US is more violent for other reasons, which are more fundamental and significant, and higher gun ownership rates are only responsible for a small fraction of the overall problem?

This is likely true, but why should the issue only be attacked from one angle? Why not nibble away from all sides taking away some guns here, patching the social safety net there, and so on?

Let me answer your question with a hypothetical.

Suppose you could lower the murder rate by 10% by spending all your political capital on a draconian campaign of gun control that would have the far right literally up in arms including rural guerilla movements. Or you could lower the murder rate by 20% by spending it on social programs that will cause the far right to grumble a lot but eventually acquiesce because seriously, they can't even get their shit together enough to repeal Obamacare.

You do not have enough political capital to do both; even doing one will be a hard-fought battle. Which would you choose, from a utilitarian point of view?

The kind of gun control that rounds up existing guns in the US would be effectively impossible to implement. Too many owners would view it as unconstitutional and engage in civil disobedience (at best) or armed resistance (at worst). In the cases involving civil disobedience, some of the courts, maybe even the Supreme Court, would agree with them. And that's not just because of Republicans on the court, either.

This is not the first time you've been told this. Please stop opining on US gun control until you're prepared to address this reality squarely.

While this is true and it's also true that crimes with automatic weapons are vanishingly rare in most 1st world nations, the fact that so many automatic weapons exist in civilian hands makes buying or stealing them easier than it is in many other nations.

Has it happened? You don't know whether this is a case of a properly registered automatic weapon being bought or stolen in the US. How many such cases of legal machine guns being bought or stolen for crimes have actually occurred?

As Flagg noted that is more closely tracked ever since the attacks and has a far greater risk to the would-be killer. I don't know about you, but I think that if all spree shooters had to make bombs instead more of them would die or be caught before reaching their target location. Even the Boston Marathon attacks were far lesser in scale than this and left the attackers more open to capture after the fact.

You think. You haven't evaluated this, not really.

And yes, ONE way to make explosives is being tracked. Not all, and not necessarily in a way that would catch everything. I mean hell, if "we closed that one loophole so it can't happen again" can be used to dismiss the Oklahoma City bombing, why can't we just close one loophole and say "it can't happen again" here?

If the guns were stolen that's still a gun control issue as one can't steal that which has been seized and destroyed. Canadian laws also restrict magazine sizes while encouraging people to lock up their ammo or store it well away from their firearms. This reduces crimes of passion and makes firearm theft less immediately dangerous. We also restrict weapons based on how easy it is to convert them into automatic weapons...

Yeah, if you want to drive your firearm from your home to the range you have to call it in. You're also highly discouraged from making stops between those points with said weapons.

So yeah, if you're willing to pay the political tax to restrict firearms you can sure as fuck do it and enforce it. Canada makes California look like Texas.

And I get that this makes you hard and all.

But seriously, you either have no concept of the differing level of resistance such gun control measures would encounter in the US compared to Canada, or you are an actively malicious troll promoting policies you know will lead to violent chaos.

[JLTucker]

Saw a(alleged) picture of a Daniel Defense AR with a bumpfire stock recovered. I suspect a ATF Legal Opinion Letter that this constitutes conversion to a MG will arrive this year.

Can you do 600-800 rounds a minute with bumpfire stock?

[SCRawl]

If the killer was able to modify otherwise legal weapons to make them fully automatic, or even just even just shoot the things off as has been suggested via "bumpfire", then this is a big problem that only gun control can solve, and it seems to me difficult to solve without some actions the American people would probably think too draconian. I'd never heard of "bumpfire" before, but after having Googled the thing, it seems to me that if fully automatic weapons are too dangerous for civilians to own, then semi-automatic weapons which can be converted into fully automatic (or effectively simulate fully automatic fire) are too dangerous for civilians to own. I just don't know how to do that, other than say "Sorry, you can't have it."

What do you expect to happen in the US if this is tried, from a consequentialist viewpoint?

I don't live in the US, so for this and other reasons my opinion isn't worth much. But I'll give it a shot.

There are two possible things here, right? There's a ban on future sales of weapons and a roundup of existing weapons in the category of "too dangerous", however that would be defined*. Let's say that there can be more or less universal agreement among legislators about what is and not "too dangerous", and that it does more than just duplicate the "ugly gun" laws of the past. The rank and file firearm enthusiast might not agree, but I'm completely discounting their opinions here for the sake of argument.

In the case of a ban, if there were sufficient political will to make it happen, then I would expect lots of grumbling and chest-thumping, not to mention stocking up in anticipation of such a ban, but ultimately not a lot of bad consequences. Not a lot of good consequences either, because of the enormity of the extant stockpile.

If the government were to try to round up the extant stockpile, well, let's just say I don't know how that would be possible. Those who possess such items for the most part wouldn't want to give (or sell) them to the government. All the worst warnings from the firearm enthusiasts and militia types about the gun-grabbers would be coming to pass, and it would surprise me if the latter didn't try banding together in places like rural Montana, channeling Charlton Heston. The only thing for it would be to call up the military, and that wouldn't end well.

So, basically, in this way the US is fucked. The status quo is terrible, and there's really no way to fix it even if the political will existed to make the attempt. It can be made a little better, but not much.



* If we must have such a definition here, let's assume it's something like "is capable of, or can be modified to be able to discharge more than x rounds per minute" for some reasonable value of x. I don't know if such a definition can be made realistic; I suspect that it can't.

[Lonestar]

Can you do 600-800 rounds a minute with bumpfire stock?

I mean, I wouldn't assume I could.

[Civil War Man]

Unless you have something quasi-exotic like .300 Blackout where the only sound is a bolt slap, most silencers and cartridges aren't "hearing safe". The silencer on my AR reduces the sound to a mere jackhammer.

Fisher was the one who brought up the "hearing safe" claim. My point was that a suppressor like that would make it harder for people to figure out where shots are coming from, which can directly lead to an increase in the body count of a mass shooting by adding to the panic in the crowd (since they don't know where to run) and making it harder for people, including law enforcement, to locate the shooter and stop them.

Generally, free access to any mods or components that makes it easier for the shooter to keep shooting or increases their fire-rate is going to result in larger body counts. Sometimes society deems that the trade-off is acceptable (breech-loading vs. muzzle-loading, magazine vs. single-shot), and sometimes it does not (full-auto vs. non-automatic action).

[ray245]

If the killer was able to modify otherwise legal weapons to make them fully automatic, or even just even just shoot the things off as has been suggested via "bumpfire", then this is a big problem that only gun control can solve, and it seems to me difficult to solve without some actions the American people would probably think too draconian. I'd never heard of "bumpfire" before, but after having Googled the thing, it seems to me that if fully automatic weapons are too dangerous for civilians to own, then semi-automatic weapons which can be converted into fully automatic (or effectively simulate fully automatic fire) are too dangerous for civilians to own. I just don't know how to do that, other than say "Sorry, you can't have it."

What do you expect to happen in the US if this is tried, from a consequentialist viewpoint?

I don't live in the US, so for this and other reasons my opinion isn't worth much. But I'll give it a shot.

There are two possible things here, right? There's a ban on future sales of weapons and a roundup of existing weapons in the category of "too dangerous", however that would be defined*. Let's say that there can be more or less universal agreement among legislators about what is and not "too dangerous", and that it does more than just duplicate the "ugly gun" laws of the past. The rank and file firearm enthusiast might not agree, but I'm completely discounting their opinions here for the sake of argument.

In the case of a ban, if there were sufficient political will to make it happen, then I would expect lots of grumbling and chest-thumping, not to mention stocking up in anticipation of such a ban, but ultimately not a lot of bad consequences. Not a lot of good consequences either, because of the enormity of the extant stockpile.

If the government were to try to round up the extant stockpile, well, let's just say I don't know how that would be possible. Those who possess such items for the most part wouldn't want to give (or sell) them to the government. All the worst warnings from the firearm enthusiasts and militia types about the gun-grabbers would be coming to pass, and it would surprise me if the latter didn't try banding together in places like rural Montana, channeling Charlton Heston. The only thing for it would be to call up the military, and that wouldn't end well.

So, basically, in this way the US is fucked. The status quo is terrible, and there's really no way to fix it even if the political will existed to make the attempt. It can be made a little better, but not much.



* If we must have such a definition here, let's assume it's something like "is capable of, or can be modified to be able to discharge more than x rounds per minute" for some reasonable value of x. I don't know if such a definition can be made realistic; I suspect that it can't.

It's more about making sure more Americans stopped believing in that the American way of life is always the right way to go. The idea of gun owning as a free, natural and inevitable right of Americans is a little problematic. Guns should be seen as a privilege, not a right.

Until the vast majority of Americans can reconcile with that, i think there will never be any sufficient gun laws that will actually tackle the problem.

[Lonestar]

Guns should be seen as a privilege, not a right.

Self defense is absolutely a right, and firearms are an extension of that. "Haha well maybe the cops will arrive on time or maybe not" is a pretty shitty thing to say to someone.

[Crazedwraith]

Guns should be seen as a privilege, not a right.

Self defense is absolutely a right, and firearms are an extension of that. "Haha well maybe the cops will arrive on time or maybe not" is a pretty shitty thing to say to someone.

Self defense does not require guns as seen in every other country that doesn't have guns.

eta: Yes there would be a problem going from a gun heavy culture to one without guns making sure the criminals are disarmed as well. But it's not an insurmountable problem either. See Australia.

[JLTucker]

Guns should be seen as a privilege, not a right.

Self defense is absolutely a right, and firearms are an extension of that. "Haha well maybe the cops will arrive on time or maybe not" is a pretty shitty thing to say to someone.

If you can prove to me that you live and work and have daily business in a crime-ridden area, sure, get a gun. No? Fuck off.

If you hunt to control overpopulation and eat what you kill, get a gun. No? Fuck off.

[Lonestar]

Self defense does not require guns as seen in every other country that doesn't have guns.

Heh.

Yes, it does if there is a disparity of force at work. The difference is that in those other countries the government(and you, apparently) have decided that disparity of force doesn't exist, despite that it manifestly does.

[Lonestar]

If you can prove to me that you live and work and have daily business in a crime-ridden area, sure, get a gun. No? Fuck off.

Two things:

I have engaged in defensive gun use before, so, fuck off.

It isn't on you to decide what I do and do not "need" to defend myself, so long as the tools to do so aren't indiscriminate.

[Patroklos]

The only thing for it would be to call up the military, and that wouldn't end well.

People often say this, but the idea that the US military would participate in a large scale suppression of US civilians in the cause of violating one of the basic constitutional rights of said citizens, given the members of the military are overwhelmingly of the opinion it is a constitutional right, is absurd. Both of the primary characteristics of such an order would be repellent to most of the military, namely the use of military force on domestic civilian citizens AND violating the constitution they are first and foremost sworn to protect. This would at the very least lead to most lawfully refusing to obey such orders along with mass resignation and or garrisoning (refusing to leave garrison until the leadership is changed). At worst you would throw the military in such chaos it is useless for anything, along with a good portion going over to the other side.

I can think of very few circumstances where I would follow an order to attack US citizens. Its vanishingly small, and usually involves insurrection, and even then massively violent insurrection. Anything involving forcibly confiscating the weapons of law abiding citizens is definitely not one of them.

The biggest problem with the confiscation fantasies ist hat there is nobody you can reliably tap to enforce it. Law enforcement and the military are stalwart bastions of 2nd amendment sentiment.

[Flagg]

And to add: If the system failed then it’s clear that no private citizen should own fully automatic weapons. At least it is to me, someone who isn’t willing to see 58 (at last count) killed and over 400 (at last count) injured by one guy so that a few hundred (or thousand) people across the country can have toys to play with. And before you bring up the Oklahoma City Bombing, ammonium nitrate became tracked and regulated in an attempt to prevent it from happening again.

If this guy used illegally modified weapons then a possible solution to something like this happening again could be to monitor and regulate the sale and stockpiling of ammunition.

Because you may be willing to just throw up your hands and say “It’s a trajedy, the system has failed” while casting aspersions at those of us sick of hearing about how it’s a tragedy the system failed every couple years (or less), but I’m not.
I’m wanting to do things to make the system better so it won’t fail, or at least mitigate the failures.

If that makes me a fucking idiot on the moral high ground then I’m proud to be one.

By the way, how many preventable deaths per year have to result from a given cause for you to feel more strongly about it than you do about gun control? I'm informally polling here, so I'm curious.

How many other methods of preventable deaths per year in America where a cause and possible solution to prevent more of them are determined yet absolutely nothing is done to prevent them from reoccurring? Cars (which have far more utility than firearms) are heavily regulated and regularly subjected to recall. Plane crashes are investigated and entire systemic provisions are put in place to prevent another crash due to the same cause and far less people die globally per year in plane crashes than from gun violence in America alone.

Yet we have the same sad story of a heavily armed nut job killing dozens almost every year as well as “normal” gun violence and not only is zero done, but regulations are in the process of being rolled back.

So those are the preventable deaths, no matter the number, I want to prevent you smug cunt.

[Crazedwraith]

Self defense does not require guns as seen in every other country that doesn't have guns.

Heh.

Yes, it does if there is a disparity of force at work. The difference is that in those other countries the government(and you, apparently) have decided that disparity of force doesn't exist, despite that it manifestly does.

Can you elaborate please? What disparity of force is at work? Between which two groups? How does 'everyone has guns' lessen this disparity more than the hypothetical scenario of 'no one has guns'? What is the evidence for this?

What terrible evil do you think is happening in all other countries than America that guns are preventing? Can you prove it? I imagine you are annoyed with me telling you how the Us should work, equally I'm annoyed that you are implying I don't know what the conditions in my country are and that we all have our heads in the sand about something.

[Simon_Jester]

I don't live in the US, so for this and other reasons my opinion isn't worth much. But I'll give it a shot.

There are two possible things here, right? There's a ban on future sales of weapons and a roundup of existing weapons in the category of "too dangerous", however that would be defined*. Let's say that there can be more or less universal agreement among legislators about what is and not "too dangerous", and that it does more than just duplicate the "ugly gun" laws of the past. The rank and file firearm enthusiast might not agree, but I'm completely discounting their opinions here for the sake of argument.

What, all the legislators agree? Your scenario has now diverged far enough from reality that it no longer addresses my question.

But you do start trending back towards reality further on, so I'll keep reading.

In the case of a ban, if there were sufficient political will to make it happen, then I would expect lots of grumbling and chest-thumping, not to mention stocking up in anticipation of such a ban, but ultimately not a lot of bad consequences. Not a lot of good consequences either, because of the enormity of the extant stockpile.

Okay, this is you at least starting to acknowledge the issue. I respect that.

If the government were to try to round up the extant stockpile, well, let's just say I don't know how that would be possible. Those who possess such items for the most part wouldn't want to give (or sell) them to the government. All the worst warnings from the firearm enthusiasts and militia types about the gun-grabbers would be coming to pass, and it would surprise me if the latter didn't try banding together in places like rural Montana, channeling Charlton Heston. The only thing for it would be to call up the military, and that wouldn't end well.

So, basically, in this way the US is fucked. The status quo is terrible, and there's really no way to fix it even if the political will existed to make the attempt. It can be made a little better, but not much.

This is, basically, why I answered to Jub as I did. The US started with a bigger gun culture than most developed nations, it has accordingly accumulated a very large number of guns that are overwhelmingly owned by law-abiding people... And many of those law-abiding people are firmly convinced that private gun ownership is a vital civil right, equal in status and significance with the freedom of speech or the right to vote. They're not going to change their mind on that subject.

So the most gun control can accomplish in the US is farcical nibbling around the edges. And this is done at ruinous political expense; it's one of the key "wedge issues" exploited by the far right to convince rural voters that the center-left Democratic Party is actually a bunch of sneering elitists out to take away their citizen-farmer freedoms. We'd be better off as a nation today if the Democrats had never brought up the idea of gun control at the national level in the first place, or at least never tried to ban and instead simply worked on things like waiting periods and background checks.

It's more about making sure more Americans stopped believing in that the American way of life is always the right way to go. The idea of gun owning as a free, natural and inevitable right of Americans is a little problematic. Guns should be seen as a privilege, not a right.

Until the vast majority of Americans can reconcile with that, i think there will never be any sufficient gun laws that will actually tackle the problem.

Can you actually explain coherently why "bearing arms" is a privilege granted for good behavior and not a right citizens default to having unless there's a specific reason they shouldn't have it?

Or is this just a default assumption on your part? Are Americans are just uniformly dumber and more childlike and ignorant than people in other countries, so that a large fraction of Americans automatically wrong about this? Because seriously, I've seen a lot of people argue for gun control who just assume this, and it's done more than anything else to turn me from pro-gun-control to anti-gun-control.

We have two groups of people. One believes they have an important right and wants to protect it. The other group believes that the right in question does not exist and wants to take it away. Normally, in cases like this we expect to see a damned good argument on the part of the group that wants to abolish the right. If someone tried to convince you that voting or free speech or moving to another town were "privileges" that you should have to earn by making special arguments and pleas to your government, they'd probably fail unless they had one hell of a good argument.

But most of the gun control advocacy I've seen in the past ten years doesn't even make an effort to justify this. It just says "lol no, this right you believe you have does not exist, the grownups should take it away from you."

Can't you do better than this? It's frustrating to watch.

How many other methods of preventable deaths per year in America where a cause and possible solution to prevent more of them are determined yet absolutely nothing is done to prevent them from reoccurring? Cars (which have far more utility than firearms) are heavily regulated and regularly subjected to recall. Plane crashes are investigated and entire systemic provisions are put in place to prevent another crash due to the same cause and far less people die globally per year in plane crashes than from gun violence in America alone.

Yet we have the same sad story of a heavily armed nut job killing dozens almost every year as well as “normal” gun violence and not only is zero done, but regulations are in the process of being rolled back.

So those are the preventable deaths, no matter the number, I want to prevent you smug cunt.

Well no, I'm actually serious. I mean, suppose it were established that the US has X surplus deaths per year caused by use of antidepressants whose side effect is a 50% increase in heart failure rates, when an alternative exists that would cause fewer deaths. Switching medications would save X lives a year. How big would X have to be, before the issue became as important to you as gun control is?

I'm not asking this to be smug or obnoxious, I am genuinely curious.