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.

Gun control legislation does work.

To use a real life example, the last mass shooting in the UK was the Dunblane school shooting in 1996, when a shooter walked into a school and killed 16 students, a teacher, and then himself. Subsequently, legislation was introduced that banned the ownership of handguns. Now, the ownership of effectively all guns is banned in the UK, and there has not been a mass shooting since Dunblane, and the USA has a vastly higher rate of gun homicide than the UK.

Simply banning bumpstocks, or limiting semi-automatic rifle ownership on its own will not do much. After the Hungerford massacre, also in the UK, legislation was passed banning pump-action and semi-automatic weapons, but this didn't stop the Dunblane shooter, who entered the school with 4 handguns.

As has been previously mentioned, obviously it would be naive to expect gun control, even a complete ban, to eradicate gun violence, however, it clearly has helped in the UK, so it bewilders me that lobbying groups in the USA are pushing for more guns.

To me, being unable to hunt for sport, or whatever else people do with guns, seems a small price to pay to potentially prevent mass gun homicide, and I would certainly feel safer in the knowledge that practically no one is carrying a gun.

As far as I know, anybody, at all, regardless of age, criminal back ground, or mental status, can buy every part of any gun, including guns that are only legal to purchase and/or own by military personnel, online, with no restrictions. Therefore, even if we made it harder to buy guns, buying gun parts and building untraceable guns will still be possible.

It's always possible. I don't even need to buy manufactured parts to make a "gun". All you need is a pipe that you can rifle with a drill bit, and a hammer mechanism and you have the basis for a single shot pipe gun. The point of any law is not to make something impossible. It's to make it harder.

But, again, this is just being obtuse about gun control. If it is easy to build a gun because the selling of gun parts is not regulated, then regulate it. It's not rocket science. Just because it's gun parts and not an actual gun does not mean it can't be regulated under gun control.

to inform all of you, just this morning there was another school shooting in santa fe high school in texas. it is the second most fatal school shooting this year with 8 students dead from what i've gathered.

i think america should start small with the gun control and see where it goes. start off with military grade weapons, such as the AR-15.

i'm just really tired of seeing these school shootings happen, it breaks my fucking heart tbh.

I feel like if they gave classes and weapons to certain teachers, this issue would be addressed better than taking legal guns off the street. What of the many guns out of regulation, without serial numbers, sold on the black market? When they make it to the street, the same people that have them now will continue to have them, except the ones that legally are allowed to own them.

While guns cause problems, the problems they cause can be fixed with them. Police show up to 5% of crime scenes within time to do something, and even then its usually de-escalading a situation that's already out of hand enough that something happens anyway. Seeing that we have the problem we do, it is best to stay armed. If teachers had guns, or even if the security force had weapons, I garuntee we wouldnt hear about near as many school shootings.

The attitude of "there is a gun problem lets give people guns" compounds the problem it doesnt help it.

If a kid comes into school with a stick and starts hitting other kids with it you confiscate the stick, you dont give the "responsible" kids sticks as well so that they can beat the shit out of any other kids who picked up a stick - its ludicrous and obviously not the solution. Also in any group of people, kids, teachers, policemen, anyone; there will be some unstable people who when they get their hands on a gun in a position of responsibility they will use it wrong, pretty easy to see how this could be the case with teachers, especially since they have an incredibly stressful job and have to deal with some really annoying kids all day.