Anti-gun is safety/medical arguments: Guns are a clear hazard to personal safety, and removing them from circulation will reduce the number of gunshot wounds and associated deaths, etc. This position is based on the ongoing massive human carnage committed with guns which has been going on for hundreds of years and is creating fresh corpses daily.

Pro-gun is political/self defense arguments: hundreds of years of European history where the rulers could carry weapons and the ruled could not, disarmament as a prelude to oppression/massacre in 20thC, distant or incompetent law enforcement meaning safety can only be provided by the individual.

I'm not sure if there is a way to bridge the gap between different value systems. For me personally I'm not going to buy firearms illegally, but I will never be happy about being a 2nd class citizen in my own country.

Nevermind that studies show a weak or non-existent link between banning guns and homicide reduction. But even if they didn't, the right to bear arms is more important than letting politicians decide who has the right to self-defense.

http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/jlpp/Vol30_No2_Kate...

It’s that anti-gun positions generally are not at all anti-gun they are anti-private individual, but happy for the state to use guns, and thus to be the sole arbiter of who is defended and who is defenseless.

Better to admit that was wrong if you’re interested in having a discussion, and maybe even influencing some people’s opinions.

Gun violence is a absolutely a big problem in the US. The interesting twist is it’s a Constitutional right to bear arms in the US, so this is a case of a limitation of government power leading to an adverse outcome. It’s a difficult and widely debated issue in American politics, and in fact the American people will ultimately decide how the rules around gun ownership will evolve over time in the hopes of reducing that number in pursuit of a safe and free society.

Further, I can kill more people with a truck than I can with a gun. People use guns because of the fear, the spot light, and the ability to target.

I don't disagree people see things as common sense. I also don't disagree in having some laws governing weaponry. That doesn't mean I don't think we should be allowed to own them, nor that it isn't benificial. Honestly, I'd like research done to prove it one way or the other and be rational about it.

Guns are an immediate force multiplier that can cause a lot of injury with little planning. Guns make it easy for someone who has a brief thought of suicide, anger, or stupidity to act on that thought with irreversible consequences. While in high school, one friend committed suicide with their family's gun. Another person I know was shot because their friend was playing around with a gun.

I think only when both sides can agree that a) guns will likely never be banned and b) yes, guns are dangerous and require more regulation that we currently have, will we get anywhere. Until then people will just talk past each other.

[1] This is based on older studies at this point because the NRA has made it impossible to get funding to study gun violence.

I am very anti-firearm as well, and the only decent justification for them is that it gives more power to the people against the government in the event of some kind of revolution.

But as an outsider, it does seem that all your pro-gun people in the US seem like a bunch of right wing nutters. Certainly the vocal ones come across that way.

What are your opinions on this?

The idea that the unique problems the US has in with guns are a simple result of the numbers of gun owners is wrong. There are tons of gun owners in the Alps and in Scandinavia, and not a single region has comparable problems. Over here if at all guns are usually used in suicides and domestic murders, someone robbing you at gunpoint is so rare that it is newsworthy.

I'd say this has more to do with how we deal with poor, sick and/or criminal people than with the existence of guns.

I own exactly zero guns, but I fully support the 2nd amendment.

Using the argument of "Hardened criminals will still get them anyway" is like saying we shouldn't have a law against murder because some people will do it anyway, so it's a waste of time. The point is to deter or make it extremely difficult for as many people as possible

No, it is nothing like saying that. Murder in itself is a very bad thing. Owning a gun isn't a bad thing, it's what the gun can be capable of that is bad. Just like alcohol itself isn't a bad thing, it's what the person is capable of doing when drunk, that is bad. That's why alcohol isn't illegal, but driving drunk is. That's why guns shouldn't be illegal, but using them in an unsafe manner should be.

People act like guns are only useful for committing crimes and mass shootings. Guns are a tool; we have a cultural problem, not a simple gun problem.

Protection from, and ability to overthrow, the government is a pretty laughable justification for firearm ownership these days. Let's ignore for a moment the fact that gun owners would have to take a page from Al Quaeda to have any meaningful chance against even a single branch of the U.S. Military operating on their home turf. We can ignore that, because the government doesn't need force to operate as they please. Since the beginning of civilization, government has been about control, and a large part of control is money. If the events of the last 8 years haven't convinced you that the US government can do whatever they want with regards to monetary policy, I don't know what to tell you.

There is a solid argument to be made that guns don't kill people, people kill people. Switzerland comes close (not really, but they're one of the closest) to the US in terms of guns per person, but they're still not quite at our level. The Swiss have approximately 46 guns per person, where the US has 90 (Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_ownership_rate). Yet, the Swiss have a small fraction (less than 1/5th) of the gun crime that we do. If you look at that list, you can see that there is either no apparent correlation between gun ownership and violence, or that data is just all kinds of wrong. I think it's the former.

So, let's accept that guns don't kill people, people kill people. We're left to reach only one conclusion. America is has a disproportionately high rate of murderous psychos. Let's throw away the Constitution for a moment (stop laughing, I'm serious) and look at it from a strictly rational, problem solving perspective. If you were presented with two groups of people, one group had a low rate of murderous psychos, and the other had five times the number of murderous psychos, would you arm the group with 5x the psychos? This is a serious question, and there are two schools of thought with serious answers. Both of these scenarios below grant that the measures taken will be 100% effective, which is a pipe dream, but let's play the game anyway.

Gun school: arm everyone. A murderous psycho is apt to think twice before going on a murdering rampage if he's certain that everyone in the room is carrying a gun as well. There is a near 100% chance that someone in the crowd will fight back and the psycho will end up dead. Even if the psycho decides to go on a rampage, they'll be stopped quickly and won't be able to harm many people.

Anti-gun school: make it impossible to get guns. The murderous psycho will have to resort to other means of killing people, like a knife or an axe. Because these tools are cumbersome and require a close range to use effectively, the number of people harmed is limited.

In reality, neither school is "right".

The gun school of thought has several problems, not including the fact that most gun owners couldn't deploy their weapon effectively, even if they had one. And no, I'm not talking to you gun buddy who practices at the range and in IDPA, etc. I'm talking about the statistical likelihood in a population where everyone carries, which is a necessity for the gun school line of thinking. Colorado has very permissive carry laws, but no one contested the shooter on that day in Aurora. Other problems include the fact that there would undoubtedly be collateral damage, and the fact that many murderous psychos take their lives at the end of their rampage, so the threat of death isn't an assured deterrent.

The anti-gun school faces the problem that there are 88 guns per 100 people in the US right now. Do you really think that this many lawful gun owners are going to just hand over their guns? Really? Stop for a moment, please.... Really? Even if they do, contraband weapons will remain a reality in the US for a very, very long time. Then we end up back at the problem that guns don't kill people, people kill people. Make guns hard to get, and people will start improvising other means. The murderer in Aurora already exhibited the ability to manufacture bombs. You can't outlaw everything.

So I see it this way: we have to arrive at a common goal. That common goal is not going to be outlawing firearms, no matter how obvious it seems to you or your favorite celebrity. It seems reasonable, but it's impractical and politically impossible. You have to accept it.

If you want to accomplish something, you have to be clear about your goals, then adopt methods that have the greatest likelihood of success. Clearly, our goal must be to reduce the amount of violence in the US. Now we must decide on the method. Taking away firearms is impractical and ineffective because A) you can't expect to reduce the number of firearms in the US on any kind of reasonable time scale, and B) murderous psychos will find other means to kill lots of people. The only rational goal can be to have a hard look at why there are so many murderous psychos and work together to reduce them.

I know lots of gun owners, and let me tell you, they're some of the most caring and helpful people you could ever hope to meet. They own a gun because they feel that it's the responsible thing to do. I have no doubt that would any one of them have been in that theater, they would have stood up, drawn their weapon and opened fire on the murderous psycho that day. That act would have surely drawn the fire of the gunman, but they would have done it anyway. These are not the people you should persecute. We should find a way to work with gun owners, not against them.

The term "murderous psycho" is not meant to be hyperbole or some kind of joke. The people who commit these crimes are often psychopaths, by clinical definition. They often go untreated, although not unidentified, until something like Aurora happens. James Holmes' mother was not surprised when contacted by authorities. Does this not seem like the most broken aspect of this situation? And I'm not suggesting a witch hunt for psychotics. That won't work any better than the war on drugs, or the war on firearms for that matter. We have to open up the dialogue about mental illness. We have to start talking about it as more than the punchline of a joke. A person who is sprialling out of control needs to feel comfortable that they have somewhere to go and receive help, not imprisonment.

Everything in moderation.

Guns kill things, it is their purpose and easy access to guns makes the killing of people more likely.