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Well it's both. Guns contribute to the murder problem (not just mass shootings but generally), but also to suicide, overall levels of violence etc.
Lazy and uncharitable. Even if you reject them, there are reasonable, and to my mind persuasive, genuine public safety rationale behind restricting gun ownership, so why not talk about those instead of navel-gazing about how much your own outgroup are out to get theirs'.
As a blue tribe urbanite, I am not a gun owner, nor are any of my family or close friends.
My point is that, if you care about people dying, then why not focus on the things that kill orders of magnitude more people than mass shootings? To name a few: Heart disease, diabetes, urban violence?
I agree with this. And in fact, I support greater enforcement against people who carry unlicensed guns. Putting people who have illegal guns behind bars would greatly reduce gun violence, more than any legislative action. Here in Seattle, people who commit multiple felonies and are caught with illegal guns are often put back onto the streets with charges dismissed. As a result, 2023 will set the record for the most murders ever committed in the city.
As to banning guns entirely, the second amendment is my mind prevents that.
Well guns are part of the urban violence, for one. In terms of other issues, maybe there are more important things (but consider what policy response you would propose for obesity etc. - are there any ones which would both have a shred of support and make a big difference)? However guns are certainly a sufficiently important problem to be worthy of some national debate. The West ought to talk about traffic deaths and heart disease more, but in America ideally at the expense of culture war fluff like trans issues rather than something genuinely important like guns.
True, but so would many conventional gun control measures like ERPOs, and indeed just reducing the overall ownership of guns. American should be doing all of these.
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