I agree with other views expressed here that criminals will always find a way to bypass any ban on guns and get access to them leaving the lawful citizens at disadvantage, it might lead to massive rise in crime in the long run. Police simply can't be everywhere all the time and by current ratio of citizens-police which is quite high, everyone deserves to carry a firearm for protection.

Limiting Ammunition seems to be a better idea than guns themselves but still not a perfect solution.

I prefer star control. It'd help keep the Ur Quan from enslaving us.

In the spirit of a mature debate, I'd like to make a rambling point that I could easily get to much quicker.

We recently had a press story in the UK where a leadership candidate for a major party, suggested "woman only" carriages on trains in order to reduce the number of sexual assaults on trains (apparently it has escalated recently). He was widely criticised for this suggestion, the main reason being that women shouldn't feel they need to be segregated. They should be free to travel in the same carriage as men without fear of assault, and to simply remove the women from the location is not addressing the actual problem, which is that there are men sexually assaulting women on trains.

When I hear people making the "defense" argument for gun control I think of it in a similar way to the train carriages. You shouldn't address the problem of psychopaths armed with guns being able to wander around freely by making sure everyone is also carrying guns so it's a level playing field, you should address the problem by stopping there being psychopaths with guns. That' could be through better vetting of who can own the guns, or reduction in the availability of guns. However when people say they need them to defend against these people, I feel they're disguising the issue.

Personally I wouldn't want to live in a country where I would feel that it was sufficiently possible (such that I'd by a gun) that I would need to shoot someone in the course of my everyday life. That is (in my opinion) not a solution.

As for overthrowing the state - The Iraqi army against ISIS demonstrated very effectively that having all the toys is of no use when you're not a well trained military. Anyone believing there could be an effective revolution against the US army is completely barking mad.

I was talking semi-automatic rifles kind of thing. I stand corrected that it is not nearly as consistent across the States as I thought. I would still maintain, though, that in some areas of the US there are weapons for sale that should not be available to civilians.

I kind of agree with that candidate because even if they were to bring about a change in mindset of people to stop sexual assaults, it is a slow transition and during that time I think it would be necessary to introduce "women only" carriages. But still I see what you're trying to say, that changing mindset of people should be the top priority rather than stopgap solutions.

I was expecting to see an 1800 date.
Not something post 2nd world war.

That said, our own government allowed systemic child abuse for decades in a time when communication and social care should have made it impossible.

The caricature of Russians portrayed make the videos all the more enjoyable.

Thanks for the suggestion. Will check it out :)

It's not about constantly worrying you're under attack - it's about having a right to be able to defend yourself. The difference is subtle but important. Most US citizens have never seen a gun or felt the urge to have one, just like in many other 1st World nations.

TL;DR of below: Better enforcement of existing laws is necessary. Better education / licensing requirements would be a perfectly reasonable addition to that. The problem isn't guns, it's people who shouldn't get a license but can due to bad IT setups / FBI not talking to sellers / sellers not talking to the FBI.

In the US we actually are supposed to have background checks and other things to keep potentially dangerous people from getting guns. But often when someone goes crazy with a guy, it turns out the actual checking process is so bad that people who shouldn't have guns get them. We don't need more laws or high-tech triggers or whatever. We do need to enforce the actual legal limits on gun ownership. If there was a more straightforward licensing scheme a la driver's licenses that would be a good idea too.

Most people who use guns are responsible, intelligent people, but of course they don't make the news. There's nothing camera-worthy about a person who has a job, a family and goes hunting some weekends.

Re: Psychopaths with guns, the problem is more cultural acceptance of mental health treatment and violence. Also, demographics.

Laws can't really do much to make people more willing to be open about possible craziness, and every attempt to limit the cultural acceptance of violence has met really extreme reactions - just check out how people reacted to Target not selling GTA in Australia.

If people see violence treated as an acceptable solution to interpersonal situations in entertainment than the ones who have trouble dealing with reality are going to be more likely to use it IRL. How many people do you know who refuse to listen to what they don't want to hear, treat every bad thing as a personal insult or are otherwise mildly delusional? More than you want to realize, probably. Due to the really crazy way that debate got started no one wants to talk sensibly about how media culture impacts viewers, which I think is a major disservice.

Demographically, the US is so much larger and more diverse than any single EU country that comparisons are really problematic. Specific example of how demographic differences impact this question:

Lots of gun control proponents talk about how the UK has ditched guns for example, but that's really only possible in a very small and relatively homogenous place like the UK - and yes, the UK is ethnically and culturally homogenous compared to the US, and also more tightly packed. There's simply fewer people who are potentially criminals, fewer gaps between cultural expectations that can cause miscommunication, fewer places to take off to once something happens, smaller black market, etc. The US is also at the crossroads of major international shipping and so there's a large problem with drug cartels that I don't think people understand until they've lived with it. Police in certain parts of the country really couldn't effectively police without guns, and in other parts they genuinely don't need them. Criminals have guns regardless of gun control laws, but ordinary citizens have trouble arranging to defend themselves when they really need it - Washington DC is a good example of this, with a gun control law so strict it was unconstitutional causing massive harm to the citizens because criminals preyed on them at will.

It's a complicated question that gun control advocates often reduce to 'Don't let people have guns because guns kill people and getting rid of guns worked in the UK'.

Guns do not kill people, broken societies kill people.

There are too many signs of a broken society that America has become.

Too many single mothers, too many kids growing up to be criminals, glorification of war in Middle East, higher than normal divorce rate, decadence and debauchery, promiscuous teens, kids giving birth to kids, slut walks, wall-street corruption, narcissism, me me me attitude, population explosion etc.

it is too late to find a cure. The cancer is in it's final stages. Things will only get worse.

Don't agree with everything you said, but it's true that the impact of divorce on kids is hard to overstate. All the data we have says kids really, really suffer when the family splits up.

Totally true. But that's not just an American problem. Remember, global culture and all that. Personally, I think backwards middle eastern countries are kinda crazy, but I can also understand their reluctance to join the 21st century. For all the great things about modern living, it's gone schizo in a lot of ways. There will be Muslim witch doctors applying voodoo to locals in order to exorcise the demons long after the west has gone the way of the dodo.

Not only that, how can you really overthrow everything and hope the sistem (that is penalizing you since it will be naturally altruistic and corrupt) works, when those of power, who hold most of the resources, will think that maybe, they can play fair? and allow their enemies to be without the scathe legallywhen they can kill you off quietly and control the information of your death and basically no one would know you died or dissapeared? sure, the corrupt runner of congress and head of assembly AND main trafickker of drugs in a country WILL SURELY let you go scot free for something that can damage his progress and not use a method to which no one (even on international terms) would know you were killed through this man's means? then of course, this people are NUTZ
You are directing your bitching at a FIRST world country that isn't even that close to being what you describe

Your point is made if you talk about ANY second or THIRD world country in Latin America, India and Oceania.

Broken is broken, he didn't say how broken in comparison with others.
Compared to certain parts of Europe/Scandinavia, the USA are pretty broken for sure but everyone has his problems.
When it comes to the social environment, modesty and hospitality, some countries in the western world can learn a thing or two from poorer countries. There is no two dimensional scale.

In the end it's a local thing though.
It's much more important in which street or town you are living than in which country or even on which continent.

No. This is bullshit flavored bullshit, and you're hurting kids. Correlation, causation, all that stuff. (Also, everything he wrote is wrong, but I'm not arguing with MRAs.)

Kids suffer when the family is dysfunctional. If there's no stigma against divorce ("blah blah kids suffer"), then a dysfunctional family divorces and a happy family stays together. As a result, kids in nondivorced families fare better than with divorced parents.

If there IS stigma against divorce, a dysfunctional family stays together, and this is fucking terrible for everyone involved.

So the more divorce is accepted by a society, the better it differentiates between happy and dysfunctional families, and the greater the contrast between the corresponding averages -- so it seems like divorce is a bad idea. But the overall happiness of the people is greater.