gun ownership ensures that:
- citizens are able to defend themselves at every instance ("when seconds count, police are minutes away")
- citizens are as theoretically as powerful as the government

not hard to understand

Look at statistics on mass shootings in the U.S. and you'll find that increased gun control would severely inhibit the average mass shooter. Since 1966, there have been 153 mass shootings (4 or more dead, excluding shooter). 292 guns have been used during those shootings. Over half of them, 167 of them, were purchased legally by the shooter (admittedly, this number is inflated quite a bit by the Vegas shooter, who had 24 guns all owned legally). Many of the guns that were illegally obtained were stolen from legal owners, or were illegal purchases that were allowed because of shoddy enforcement of existing gun control laws. There are also a few cases where the shooter was denied purchasing a gun, so they bought all the parts for a gun and assembled it themselves.

By reducing the availability of legally owned guns, you naturally reduce the number of guns that are available to perform a mass shooting.

Also, even if gun control fails to lower mass shooting rates, but lowers overall gun violence, that's still an effective law. Over 1,000 people have died in a mass shooting since 1966. 2,000 people have died from guns since the start of 2018, twice the death count over 3 months compared to over 50 years.

It's unfortunate, but the number of people dying every year to guns is substantially greater than any mass shooting, but it's only when a bunch of those deaths happen at once at the hands of one person do people really start paying attention in the general public.


Crime and violent crime are down, and the going trend is still a decrease. The need to own a gun to protect yourself diminishes with it.

Furthermore, let's actually evaluate how effective gun ownership is as self-defense. The FBI estimates that the presence of a gun stops about 67,000 crimes a year, and in 2012 there were around 250 justifiable, gun-related, homicides. Seems pretty nice. Until you also realize that 232,000 guns are stolen each year, and in 2012 there were 1.2 million reported incidents of violent crime. That means, for every crime prevented by a gun per year, there's an additional 3 now illegally circulating that can be used for a different crime. For every justifiable homicide that occurred, another 4,800 was not stopped by a gun-toting "good guy".

There's a fantasy that a gun will save you in violent crime, but the sad reality is that the gun will likely do nothing. In any crime, it's not about how armed the attacker and the victim is, but whether the victim gets caught unaware. That gun strapped to your leg means nothing if the attacker pulls the gun first, or puts a knife to your throat, or punches you in the back of the head. You've been ambushed, and that gun might as well shoot water for all the good it will do you.

I'm not even going to justify the idea that citizens owning guns somehow makes you equally powerful with the government. Ignoring the hypocrisy of justifying your insurrection against tyranny using the laws of the tyranny, ignoring the fact that a law means nothing if a tyrant doesn't want it to exist, ignoring the fact that your AR-15 means nothing when a tank rolls up, it all comes down to the fact that you live in a democracy, no matter how flawed it is. You have all the control as citizens to begin with. If you don't like the government, you vote it out.

Alright, so hypothetically, more effective and strict gun control laws are put into place. As we've seen in some parts of Europe, acid attacks have been increasing substantially and 2017 was the worst year yet, and at the current rate would only continue to rise. Also, if i'm not mistaken they have stricter gun control laws than the United States. What would be stopping a perpetrator from making something along the lines of a mustard gas attack or a propane bomb which would be easier to obtain than a gun at the time, and has the possibility to kill even more than a trained shooter if it bypasses security? Building a bomb or chemical weapon doesn't take much effort into researching or is too difficult to make realistically. Investigators that found the undetonated bomb say that it had the potential to kill hundreds more. So if stricter laws were put into place, what would stop people from using other means to harm?

Nothing stops somebody from making a toxic gas or a propane bomb to begin with. If anything, it's easier to make a propane bomb or chlorine gas than it is to obtain a gun, since propane is much more loosely regulated and chlorine is readily accessible in large quantities due to it's use as a cleaning agent. Even with less strict gun laws, it's still much easier to make improvised explosives. You can literally buy a bunch of bullets, which require no identification or background checks, open them up for the gunpowder, and use the gunpowder to create pipe bombs using everyday materials.

Yet people don't. And for good reasons. First, the effort to create your own explosive or toxic gas is significantly higher than it is to walk into a store and buy a gun off a rack and a box of bullets to go with it. Second, you don't just have an explosive or toxic gas lying around for every day use, so it's less practical for impulsive attacks. Third, it's illegal to own explosives or weaponized toxic gases without the proper permit, the explosives license being heavily regulated by industry and the weaponized gas permit basically only issued to research facilities with the controlled material only allowed to be transported and stored under strictly regulated circumstances. You can at least bullshit owning a gun license if a random citizen spots you with a gun. Lastly, usage of explosives or toxic gas requires a lot more training to use without killing yourself. Guns are, relatively speaking, much easier to pick up and use compared to explosives or gas.


But more generally, as I've mentioned before, gun control isn't in place to prevent all crime. It's to prevent a specific type of crime. It's foolish to throw out a law as ineffective because it doesn't tackle a very large problem by itself.

If the fact that criminals can still hurt people regardless of what you ban can be taken as a legitimate argument, then there is no law in existence that can stand up to that same scrutiny. Why regulate automatic weapons if somebody can still buy a semi-automatic and shoot somebody? Why bother regulating explosives if you can just buy a knife and stab somebody? Why bother regulating armed drones if you can just walk up to somebody in the street and donkey punch them? All of those questions sound incredibly dense. It'd be like asking why a new drug that's designed to treat cancer doesn't treat herpes. It's why asking how gun control can stop acid attacks is a silly question. If you want to stop acid attacks, implement laws that target acid attacks.

The point of any law isn't to stop all crime, it's that through the law you make it harder or more punishing to commit a crime, thus reducing it's prevalence. There is no perfect solution to all crime, so asking for one as the starting point for any debate is just silly.

Every other place in the world does now have mass shootings like we do. Yes, guns protect people, but there's something wrong. If you can think of another solution (one not already presented) to keep kids from getting shot up in their school i would love to hear it.

Sure we are as powerful as the government, but as I stated before, America loves it's guns too much to really do anything about it. Guns over Human Lives.