Ultimately, guns are not very complicated machines. I'm making a semi-automatic rifle in my home office right now out of stuff you can get at a hardware store & some 3D printed parts, and I'm amazed at how simple it all is.

A lot of proposed gun control feels like trying to put the genie back in the bottle. Even states with hefty assault weapon bans like California and Maryland still have plenty of legal loopholes allowing people to own semi-automatic guns, and gun manufacturers are finding more all the time. I honestly think that anything short of straight up banning the sale of gunpowder will have a temporary at best effect on gun violence, and do less than nothing at worst.

The fact of the matter is that gun control bills at the federal level will cost a lot of political capital. A federal challenge to the 2nd amendment will rally conservatives in the same way that the recent overturning of Roe caused a surge for liberals. This is to say nothing about enforcement: it's a common position among gun owners that they would simply refuse to comply with a gun confiscation / surrender, and I believe a significant chunk of them would follow through with that. See the recent ATF rules about pistol braces for an example of mass non-compliance.

So, we can fight the uphill battle of gun control for perhaps marginal returns, or we can try to address the things that drive people to violence in the first place. And I'm not just saying "muh mental health" either; we need to address housing costs, healthcare costs, education costs, wages stagnating behind inflation, broken-windows policing, the war on drugs, the mainstreaming of far-right propoganda, the decay of public schooling, white supremacy, queerphobia, misogyny, climate change & doomerism, corporate personhood, and a fuckload of other things making people angry and desparate and hopeless enough to kill people & themselves.

I firmly believe that addressing the material conditions that create killers will prevent more murders than any gun control bill, especially in the USA.

Gun violence is a symptom of socioeconomic inequality and a lack of mental health care. We could ban all guns today and while I'm sure there would be a reduction in violent events, people wanting to cause harm would switch to bladed weapons (see knife crime in the UK and axe attacks in China).

Maybe, just maybe guns are actually the problem.

This reads like pig-induced hysterics.

I'm not anti-gun myself, but there are far better arguments for the anti-gun crowd to use than this.

And yet we're seeing a drop in gun related deaths after it spiked during the pandemic:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6b/1999-_Gun-related_deaths_USA.png

It's too early to call this a trend, but assuming home conversion to full auto is getting common, it has not yet correlated with a rise in gun deaths.

I don't think it will for an important reason: full auto actually sucks. Most people don't know how to use it and tend to spray bullets while hitting nothing. Even the AR15, which has relatively low recoil, is not very accurate when you hold down the trigger like that.

One exception is the 2017 Las Vegas shooting (which was a bump stock, but effectively the same end result). He was shooting into a large crowd where every bullet was all but guaranteed to hit someone. Most mass shootings aren't like that.

The way the military uses full auto isn't necessarily to hit anyone, either. It's to force the enemy to keep their heads down so your side can maneuver into a better position. That's not how a lone mass shooter would operate. They don't have a team where that tactic makes sense.

Gosh, I mean what could guns NOT fix?!??

gun thread, lemme hit you with some easy unsourced stats real quick.

About a third of all people who attempt suicide will never attempt it again, about a third will attempt it pretty repetitively, and about a third fall somewhere in the middle, where they engage in multiple attempts, but stop after the 5th or whatever. This is to say that suicide is mostly a spur of the moment decision and most people who attempt suicide aren't completely committed to it as a course of action. It's mostly a decision that's made as a result of being kind of fed up and believing you have no other options in your life, it's not a conscientious, committed kind of philosophical position, most of the time. I think there's some sort of minor study about a bridge in, I wanna say canada, where they set up a net underneath one bridge, and another bridge about 20 minutes away didn't have a net set up underneath it. Still, the suicides went down by about the amount you would expect to see, had you just eliminated all the suicides taking place on the bridge with the net. The people committing suicide weren't willing to drive about 20 minutes to dive off of a different bridge, it was just something they sort of did in the moment.

So, that's all a pretty good indication that limiting gun access to the suicidal would be a relatively helpful thing to do. The most counterargument I've heard against this is that, regardless of that, we should still have free access to guns, and they shouldn't be regulated by the government, because our right to guns trumps everyone else's right to not be successful in killing themselves. I don't think I need to tell you that this is a kind of disgusting viewpoint.

I think we can also probably say that the same would be true of gun crime broadly. There are multiple factors going into gun crime, like housing prices, redlining, drug trafficking, mental illness, sure. One of these factors is also guns. Taking away any of these factors, including guns, not just lead to a reduction in gun crime, but would probably lead to a reduction in crime overall. A reduction in crime overall with no substitution in the form of increased knife violence or other forms of violence or crime.

It's much harder to secure your illegally owned high value property, in drugs, if it is more expensive and harder to access a gun. If it's more expensive, that eats into your profit margins. This alone would probably cut down on violent gun crime, and drug related violent crime more broadly.

I also feel like I'm taking crazy pills whenever people talk about how if you limited access to guns, people would just switch over to knives, and knives would be equally as effective. No they wouldn't! You have to be extremely fit and trained properly to wield a knife effectively, and even then, two or three people can easily overwhelm you and jump on top of you. People can more easily outrun you. If you wanted to try and make the leap from one technology to the other, I would think people would compare guns more to IEDs, since there's obviously more of a similarity there in terms of effectiveness, but obviously it's much harder to secure your drugs with IEDs, or to rob someone with a pipe bomb.

The most compelling argument against gun regulations, and especially more extreme gun regulations, is that it's really hard to get them passed, and especially at the federal level, which is what would really cut down on their trafficking. You also have a problem with law enforcement, since most law enforcement, and probably federal law enforcement, wouldn't really be willing or effective in stripping americans of most of their guns. You'd probably see more success with something like limiting ammunition sales or gun manufacturing, but you'd obviously expect to get lobbied against pretty hard, and, at least if you were to limit gun manufacturing, you'd only expect to see results on that maybe 10+ years down the line, in decades, and, depending on how that was passed, you might just see it get repealed before you could see anything from it.

Of course, the caveat with all of that is that most americans are actually perfectly willing to conform to, and vote for, reasonable restrictions on guns. This includes universal background checks, mental health checks, wait periods, obviously limiting things like automatic capabilities and magazine size (though to what extent this limits unlawful use, I'm not quite sure). Probably at the farther end I'd guess americans might vote for requiring licensing from gun owners, and secure handling and transportation, like most european countries, which might limit unlawful use by limiting theft.

I think also lots of gun owners are straight delulu when it comes to how effective their gun might be. They come up with lots of little hypotheticals and heuristics to try and train for, but in a gunfight, it is usually the person who shoots first who wins, the person who has the element of surprise. If you're getting robbed at gunpoint, you've already lost. You almost have to wield your gun like a lunatic, brandishing it at people for intimidation, in order for it to be an effective form of self-defense (this is illegal in most places). There's also the idea that open carry can prevent crime, but that it might also mark you as an easier, higher priority target, so I'm kind of skeptical of it. Maybe it's better for home invasions or something, but that's not a particularly high likelihood anyways, and you have problems with wall penetration and such. Most home robbers are going to want to hit your place when you're not in it anyways.

I wonder how quickly can the Glock switch be destroyed, like after using it. It's just plastic/filament, right?

No one likes the truth. But you either need to ban, no guns, all guns, or everything other than bolt action restricted rifles, break open shotguns, and single action revolvers.

There is no middle ground. Any laws that try to drive down a middle ground are doomed to failure. There is very little difference a mini-14 Ruger which typically looks like any other "hunting rifle" and an assault rifle.

America is the land of mad max.