I can see from most of my left leaning friends that you have lapped up the anti-gun agenda. I believe you've done this with good intentions, however you've also perched yourself on a moral pedestal and are using that position to berate peaceful gun owners and attacking and insulting an important part of their culture and heritage with a very disrespectful and pompous tone. It is a losing battle as guns will not be going anywhere in America anytime soon, so all you are achieving is to further divide the country against each other. There are actual solutions to the problem of gun violence that don't require us to pin the blame on responsible gun owners.
If you look at the numbers, mass shootings are not the incidents by which to deal with gun deaths. Accidents and assaults are by far the real problem, and I'll agree, they are a problem. Way too many people are killed or injured by accidents and assaults involving firearms in our county. However the way to address this isn't to attack the American culture and encroach upon people's liberties.
Let's look at accidents. The way to prevent firearm accidents is the same way you prevent accidents with any other piece of equipment: training and education. The NRA and organizations like it used to provide excellent firearms training and education, they even did it in public schools. However, the left has purposefully been demonizing weapons and has been increasingly attempting to prohibit them by law. Not to mention making it difficult to even teach a firearms safety class in school. This forces organizations like the NRA to focus their resources on lobbying against these measures (measures the American system of government has no authority to dabble in in the first place), instead of on training and education to promote responsibility in our culture.
Firearms are a reality in our culture, as are cars, which is why they should both have a place in our educational environment to so prepare children to live in our culture. The current educational propaganda is focused making children terrified of guns, going so far as to discipline them for playing cops and robbers, or for making a gun out of a pastry. This is an irrational approach that only serves to demonized firearms and doing so only makes them more desirable to someone nurturing a homicidal ideation. Education should focus on normalization and familiarity, which removes the mystical allure of the weapon and allows children to view it as the common tool that it is.
Training would go far to prevent firearm accidents, it would likely also have an affect on assaults, however ending the drug war would likely reduce firearm assaults more than any other measure. The illegal drug trade is more common in areas and among the demographic where firearm assaults are higher. This is because black markets such as the drug trade do not provide access to the courts for dispute resolution, so people tend to resort to violence. This simply doesn't happen on anywhere near the same scale with legal transactions. The black market also provides the money for the guns to facilitate the assaults. By legalizing the drug trade the black market margins will be dried up, there will be less money to purchase black market arms, and disputes would have access to the courts for resolution, instead of solving them on the streets.
We live in a gun culture, and a frontal attack on that culture is only good for creating animosity and division. The responsible and sane solution to the problem of gun violence is to accept the reality of our culture and create policies that make it safer. Education will absolutely reduce firearm accidents. Getting rid of black markets through legalization will absolutely reduce firearm assaults on our streets. These are two real solutions that don't require the government to encroach upon the rights of anyone, and will have a profound effect on the safety of our communities. Why wouldn't we try this first? The only reason I can think of is that we are more interested in disarming the people than we actually are in facilitating their safety.
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