I’m sure if you’re bought up with the Second Amendment as part of you national culture this all makes a lot more sense. Because to a Brit, this is just confusing. A country without guns is far safer than a country with widespread gun ownership. I accept that the USA has almost certainly reached the point of no return with regard to firearms, as there are now more guns than people, and guns don’t have an expiry date. So any effort to impose retroactive gun control would be so difficult as to be impossible. Fair enough. And once you’ve reached the point where guns are freely available, there is an argument to be made for increasing legitimate gun ownership. If this is an issue of practicality, then there’s a lot of grey areas. As an American friend of mine pointed out, there is very little the US government can do to police the smuggling of weapons over the Mexican/USA border. None of us know how feasible gun control would hypothetically be, but we can agree that it would be very problematic.
But what confuses me is the ideological component. There are plenty of Americans, including yidden, who, if they were offered to press a button that would rid their countries of guns, would refuse to press it. Or to put it another way, even if it were possible to turn the USA’s situation into one similar to that of the UK, where guns are very rare and highly regulated, they wouldn’t want it. And I find it hard to fathom how somebody would reach that point of view.
I fully expect the regular deluge of strawmen, ‘Good people with guns’,’Impossible to enforce’, etc, etc. But I’m not talking about practicality. I’m talking about ideology. In the UK, guns are very difficult to get hold of. Very few police carry them, and very few criminals have them either. Even when criminals do manage to get hold of them, the difficulties in getting them into the country are so extensive, and the penalties so extreme, that they’re just too expensive and too risky for most criminals to bother with. Obviously, as an island, the UK has a geographical advantage in policing this. But the end result is, we haven’t had a mass shooting since the ban on hand guns, which was enacted in response to the Dunblaine massacre. If, purely hypothetically, it were possible to change the USA’s situation to one similar to the way it is in England, specifically with regard to guns, would you?
Awaiting your responses with genuine curiosity.