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I challenge you to rethink this framing, both because secondhand smoking is a thing (estimated cost on a Google: upwards of 40K lives per year; somewhere around 3x the total number of gun murders) and because (IIRC) most gun violence victims in the US either shot themselves or (less likely but still statistically significant) were part of an ongoing criminal enterprise. People getting shot and killed in e.g. a random mugging or a school shooting is far from the median case of death by firearm.
Yes, mandatory military/militia service.
Yes, because we don't ask it to. Probably it could if so directed.
This is how many people feel about guns.
How is that deterring the government? One would assume that a government that can force you into military service is the opposite of deterred.
The government can force you into military service if they want, and always has been able to, at least in the United States.
But yes, as IGI-111 says, a strong militia at the state level provides a very potent counterbalance to the capabilities of the federal government. Also, when every single person is either in the military or has military training, it may make your armed forces less reliable for the purposes of tyranny (since you'll have a harder time selecting for loyalists) and it makes the citizenry you'll be looking to oppress considerably more resilient. Interestingly, up to and during the Civil War, the army was actually a very localist organization. Regiments were raised from a certain geographic area, and they selected their own officers democratically – a far cry from the centralized command and control mechanisms that we all assume to be the default today.
But besides this, the reason I floated it is that it actually could be (I think, maybe) a decent mechanism for weeding out legitimately dangerous characters; a dishonorable discharge is the equivalent of a felony and bars people from firearm possession. Maybe, since we're making up stuff in the abstract (Goodguy still being in favor of the Second Amendment in practice) a simple "can you serve your country and community responsibly for a year without committing a felonious offense?" test is a good way of preemptively weeding out the people Goodguy is talking about.
(I'm very much on the fence about this and expect to get at least one comment from someone who served that actually no the psychopaths do fine in military service and then they use their experience to go tip over banks in Chicago or something. But I'd rather be conscripted for a year and then have a free pass to buy whatever gun I used in the service than live under a British shotguns-only permitting regime.)
But I think this comment is a good time to point out something sort of interesting at the heart of American freedom. Today, "freedom" is typically defined as "lack of government coercion" but the American experiment assumed lots of government coercion as part of what made freedom possible. Things like jury service, militia service, and the draft were contemplated and accepted by America's framers as something that would strengthen American freedom. A lot of this was about checks-and-balances, but I think it's worth considering the sort of person they thought such civic participation would make.
Gun ownership is like car ownership: the more you use them, the more exposure to risk you accept, but the more proficient you get at them, the more you lower your risk while using them. (Driving a car for only an hour a year is actually a bad idea!) Today there's so many truisms about "law abiding gun owners" that I think they often obscure the interesting suggestion at the heart of them, which is that unlawful firearms violence is inversely correlated to actual use of firearms. My guess is that people who own firearms to hunt, or as a hobby, get more range time than most murderers.
I don't think that using a firearm makes you a more moral person. But I do think that being part of a culture that teaches you to exercise self-governance (both at the personal level and at the civic level) is more likely to make you into a person who is law abiding and responsible. I wouldn't say we've entirely lost that culture in America, and I'm not confident the schemes people scrape together (mandatory militia service! gun permits! regulation! deregulation!) will be able to return the parts of that culture that have eroded away. But that's the America I want to (and largely do) live in, an America where I can trust my neighbors to vote wisely, serve as just jurors, handle firearms and automobiles with the respect they deserve, and ask if I mind before lighting up a cigarette.
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Those units being explicitly not under the orders of USG may help.
Consider countries like Andorra, which have laws on the books that force you to own a firearm for national defense. Putting that responsibility in the hands of local individuals (what the constitution defines as "the militia") is a way of empowering them, not making them subservient to a government that does national defense on their behalf.
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