At the end of the day, people like to own guys and there is a very profitable industry that wants to keep it that way.

The main issue is that for the potential harm of having some gun violence, the downsides are significant. Guns by the selves being banned doesn’t stop murder or anything. There are many ways to murder someone. You can do it with a rock. Guns in many ways make society more peaceful because it equalizes people. Women in particular can be every bit as dangerous as men if they need too.

The real issue with banning them, besides the people who will die because they cannot defend themselves, is that governments are extremely evil and always have been. Just in the past century governments have deliberately murdered in excess of 100 million people. Guns won’t necessarily stop authoritarian regimes from taking power, but they do make it very difficult to oppress people, as every cop who has to arrest people have to worry about how they are perceived by the community. With an armed population, the state at least has to keep a venture of morality and legitment to the people. America is a country that has more cops and prisons thay almost any nation in the world. They try to work around this by eroding away residence a little at a time, but this causes the economy to fail since our society creates so many losers and corruption runs wild.

Anyways I’m generally progun, maybe they shouldn’t be allowed in some areas like in populated areas or public spaces, outside of security for peaceful protests, but banning them entirely seems like a bad idea to me. Most of the world’s countries have already fallen to extreme orwellian authoritarianism and they are working on the U.S right now. Once the rich have robot police, 100 people will be able to control the entire human species with massive violence and terrorism. We are going to need guns at that point anyways, and hopefully before then if people wise up and stop hating each other and realize the state and the corporations are the ones doing everything possible to enslave and brainwash us, and destroy our freedom.

Can you please elaborate on: “crime should not exist in the first place?”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wounded_Knee_Massacre

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disarmament_of_the_German_Jews

Some people on Reddit were talking about how only dictators would want to disarm people

“I don’t know why any individual should ever have a right to have a revolver in his house […] people should not have handguns.”

• Richard Nixon

Ronald Reagan and the NRA advocated for gun control once the Black Panthers started arming black communities. See: Mulford Act

Banning weapons is a problem if the government needs to be overthrown by its people. In places like the USA, this is increasingly obvious that traditional systems of government regulation are rapidly dissolving.

Australia had a mass shooting in 1996 and pretty strict gun control came in. Now it’s only really sport shooters (who are a pretty responsible bunch from my experience), rural property owners with a good reason (pest control largely), certain occupations like specific security (cash transport for instance), cops and military that have guns. And criminals.

We still get the odd shooting but they’re pretty rare and to my understanding, almost never done by legal owners.

I’m not sure what things were like back in 1996 but I don’t believe we really have the gun culture so there’s not much opposition to gun control by the majority.

a legal monopoly on violence is the cornerstone of the states power. while there are definitely valid reasons to want to restrict access to the tools of violence, the state will always have that access, and if it restricts the general populations access to same, it becomes far easier to oppress them.

also, if we’re gonna ban weapons, i’d like to start with SUVs.

To make a counterpoint to all the views stated here: statistically, countries which have banned guns see far fewer gun deaths per capita than America. Gun bans work to reduce death, whatever else you may think.

The problem is that the ban is one-sided, and generally boils down to “the oppressed are disarmed but the oppressors are not.”

This is a difficult topic because on the one hand I don’t believe banning weapons addresses the root problems of violence in the first place (access to automatic weapons in the USA has decreased yet mass shooting are way up), but at the same time recent events have shown that despite being the most armed populace in the world, U.S americans refuse to even lift a finger while people are being ripped off the streets and shoved through concentration camps.

An armed people can still be a docile people.

I will mention though, even with bans- it is extremely easy to produce automatic firearms both conventional and 3-printed. I’m not convinced that a ban would be effective at hindering mass shooters in the U.S. We can bring up the statistics of other countries that lack the same firearm access of the US but I’m not sure those are apples to apples comparisons given the differences in material conditions.

I’ll bite.

I believe most crime is fundamentally due to poverty. I don’t believe you can simply enforce your way out of crime. That would be extremely expensive and wouldn’t do anything about the poverty. You’d be better off giving the police funding to the poor communities. Enforcement would be unequally dished out to poorer areas, creating an oppressive atmosphere. So when people say it’s something a dictator does, it’s because it ignores the fundamental problem in order to jump straight to aggressive policing. Aggressive policing is something a dictator does.

There’s a presumption that individuals are less likely to harm themselves or others if they are denied the tools to do so.

Whether you’re dealing with demilitarization (Palestinians are currently being asked to give up any and all remaining weapons, as a condition of permanent peace with Israel while Russia is asking much the same of Ukraine) or local disarment (Reagan’s Mulford Act seeking to deny the Black Panthers the right to Open Carry) or the Lautenberg Amendment to the Gun Control Act of 1996 (prohibits those with a domestic violence misdemeanor conviction from possessing firearms) the expectation is that no weapons means a lower and less lethal instance of future violence.

Generally speaking, the idea’s popularity hinges on whether you believe taking guns away will leave you safer (because a suspect cohort is disarmed) or more vulnerable (because the folks doing disarment intend to do you harm after you’ve been stripped of a means of self-defense)

I believe weapons should be banned and that crime should not exist in the first place

Folks fearful of dictatorship can see crime as a necessity for survival in a country that has made it a public policy to torment them.

On the flip side, “weapons should be banned” never seems to apply to the police or the military. There’s a certain attitude of “if disarment makes us safer, you disarm first”.

Well, there are 2 problems with banning weapons that I see

One. Weapons are dead simple to make. I can go to the hardware store and buy everything I need to make short range, single shot firearms, and this doesn’t even take into consideration how dangerous slings and sling shots can be when used as a weapon. Additionally, more than a few full auto sub-guns have been made by folks in their basements or sheds, with admittedly mixed results. Turns out that the magazine is actually the hardest part of a repeating firearm.

Functionally, it’s an impossible task. Weapons are generally the simplest of physics problems to solve. Just ignore safety and you’ve got t weapon.

Two. Lets say you succeed. Short term, what changes? A few less deaths, but overall crime goes up because the risks go down and you haven’t done anything to address the true causes of the crime in the first place.

Long term, you have even bigger problems if people from outside the community that has banned weapons, suddenly view you as weak and helpless. And this also discounts the possibility of your own community leaders suddenly deciding to attack in order to seize more power for themselves.

I’m in favor of armed revolution. In socialist society, we wouldn’t really need weapons as much.

The world should not have crime. And in such a world, guns would not be needed (excluding for sport).

To play devil’s advocate and get the conversation going (please don’t down vote), the idea is primarily coming from US citizens whose constitutional amendment states that the right of citizens to keep and bear arms should not be infringed. The idea behind it is self preservation (the right to live and defend yourself) and fight against government tyranny. Which, given the origin of the US, that last one is of valid concern. It’s not about the love of guns (though many do), but upholding that amendment.

The oppositional approach as I understand is if guns are illegal, there will be no mass shootings.

I don’t have an answer. I don’t have any guns, and I hate hearing about shootings. So here’s some questions to consider:

• Will laws banning firearms work against criminals? If not, who now has all the guns?
• How would we handle cases of tyranny where the government controls all militia?
• Those who intend to kill, assuming that can’t illegally obtain a gun, will they still kill? (Homemade explosives, mass stabbings, probably more) If killing people is already illegal, then how will making guns illegal make things any different long-term?
• Given the high percentage of shootings being gang on gang violence, which is illegal by the way, will new laws help?
• Statistics is complicated. Cars kill way more people, do we outlaw them? Knives kill people, do we outlaw those too? How do we measure statistically what laws will work and what won’t?
• How do you outlaw and then remove 400,000,000 guns in the US?

It’s complicated, genuinely. But people argue about it so vehemently that no ground is ever gained in the conversation. I think both sides are in favor of not killing people, but want to go about it in different ways.