“They are trying to take our guns!”

In light of years of school shootings, staggering numbers of all sorts of gun related violence, and tragicomic amount of gun related accidental deaths, one might expect the US government and judical system might take a nother look at the regulatory laws on gun ownership. One could expect, that the frequent and needless deaths of children at least would have evoked a nationwide and fairly universal popular demand to set better laws to regulate guns more. Alas no. There are wide swathes of people with enough presence of mind to have done all this and even a few presidents who have tried to address the problem, but they have achieved hardly anything. Why?

“In countries where the government has all the guns, tyranny and dictatorship reign.”

The excuses people give in defence of their “constitutional right to bear arms” are mind numbingly stupid. These seem to be either appeals to personal insecurity due to a society where crime is abundant and every numbskul might be toting a piece, or insecurity about the chance that their own government might turn into tyranny and it needed to be opposed by the citizenry. One would think that the solution to the first source of fear would quite obviously involve attempts to develope a more efficient police force, a more equal society with less desperate people to turn to crime and at very least better regulation of guns, but for some reason there are plenty of people, who do not see any of those as solutions. Instead they would arm the teachers. The second problem stems from the time when the US constitution was written. It was made by revolutionaries wary of a global empire they were braking of from, in a time when the native nations of America were still strong and the firearms mentioned had not seen rapid development from the flintlock musket in over a hundred years. The “founding fathers” had very little reason to expect weaponry to change in the foreseeanble future. Certainly they could not pass laws concerning modern automatic firearms, or what the future may hold for us in that regard. Their concern about armed militias was a question of federal army being too weak to protect the land but powerfull enough to set up a dictatorship. The modern US military is one of the most powerfull and certainly the most expensive armed forces on the planet. It really does not require any help from some random militias and even less from some individual gun owners. None of the reasons it remains unused to set up a dictatorship in the USA is a deterrence of the abundance of gun owners in the country. Any insurrection based on the efforts of random dudes weilding their AR-15 rifles would propably be fairly one sided and short lived.

“Criminals can always get illegal guns.”

Where do illegal guns come from? They were all at some point legal. There are no hidden factories making illegal guns from scrap metal anywhere. Many illegal guns are left over from wars and smuggled across borders. Those are mostly military grade assault weapons professional criminals use, but weapons smuggling is a risky business, though profitable. But hey, why make aquiring guns difficult for the would be criminal? Just sell them what they want at the local supermarket. Many illegal guns come from burglaries. A weapon in the house is not a deterrence, rather an incentive for a burglary, even in places where anybody can just step into a shop and buy one without any backround checks. Just like jewellery is an incentive for burglary in places where they are readily awailable in shops. The guns used at school shootings are however hardly ever illegal. The disturbed individuals who decide to commit a suicide by proxy and go to a school, or some other public place to shoot at some innocent bystanders most often got their assault weapons legally from the shelf of a store, or from some relative or other who had their guns legally even though they were happles enough to keep their automatic guns not in locked steel cabinets (as required in many countries) but at something like their night desk – I guess for children to find and play with it.

“from my dead cold hands…”

From the excuses given to not restrict gun ownership in the USA it becomes obvious, that the underlying reasons come from fear. That makes the discussion difficult, because the people who defend the all extending “right” to bear arms do it from a deeply emotional standpoint. They have abandoned reason to the extent, that they do not want to discuss various options, rather their view is this fierce black and white set up, where the options are reduced to everybody should be able to have a gun, or none at all. Their world seems to not hold the option of restricting guns from people who obviously can not handle the responsibility of carrying kone . This raises the question of how many of them are so dangerous imbecils, that indeed they do have every right to fear the possibility of being the type of people who would and should not be allowed to own a gun, if ever the licence to carry a gun (as in the rest of the western countries) was restricted.