300 million stat is old, I think now it's somewhere around 393 million.
Coronavirus and the riots have also created far more new gun owners among a lot of people (making an observation from my friends and other people I know).
Of course there is. There are legitimate reasons for owning a rifle in rural America (hunting), there are no legitimate reasons for owning an assault weapon, and guns can easily be made gradually less attractive. If you don't accept this even as a possibility you are part of the problem.
The other major news story is about police brutality and defunding/reducing the police force.
Exactly how do you expect people to defend themselves from violent threats when the number 1 counterpoint of "call the police" is taken away or severely limited?
The defund/dismantle/disband movement is, as I understand the movement, more about replacing the police-as-an-institution with a fundamentally different approach or set of approaches to law enforcement, not reducing the total resources or number of persons assigned to law enforcement functions.
The same way every other country has gone about this.
This has been done after wars for example (after WWII), and after many different conflicts in different countries in Africa. It would take a long time and would require tightening laws gradually and at the same time encouraging people to hand in their weapons.
This is not particularly difficult logistically, the only difficulty is in the American psyche apparently, which seems completely incompatible with this simple common-sense measure. The outcome would be fewer deaths by cop, fewer deaths in burglaries, and fewer mass shootings.
There is abundant evidence from around the globe that limiting the ownership of guns helps limit deaths.
No other country has anywhere near the absolute or per capita number of firearms that the USA has. We own almost half of all civilian firearms, more than 100x the US military, more than every military and law enforcement agency in the world combined[1]. Nor would a forced attempt at disarment be peaceful given our history and attitude towards government infringement.
Moreover, the Supreme Court has already ruled that total ban on firearms in common is unconstitutional[2][3]. Hence why DC and Chicago no longer completely ban handguns. I also don't think the in common use standard will hold since the Supreme Court more recently reiterated "the Second Amendment ex-tends, prima facie, to all instruments that constitute bearable arms"[4]. It is the opinion of some that DC v Heller was watered to get Kennedy on board. Moreover, as California has already argued, you cannot ban something then down the road argue that it's not in common use since the low numbers are artificial.
> To the extent that magazines holding more than 10 rounds may be less common
within California, it would likely be the result of the State long criminalizing the buying,
selling, importing, and manufacturing of these magazines. Saying that large capacity
magazines are uncommon because they have been banned for so long is something of a
tautology. It cannot be used as constitutional support for further banning. See Friedman
v. City of Highland Park, Illinois, 784 F.3d 406, 409 (7th Cir. 2015) (“Yet it would be
absurd to say that the reason why a particular weapon can be banned is that there is a
statute banning it, so that it isn’t commonly used. A law’s existence can’t be the source
of its own constitutional validity.”).[5]
Actual looting has been occurring in New York [0] as we discover that the police either lack the willpower or resources to actually protect American businesses. And who knows what is happening for ordinary law-and-order problems.
If someone manages to carry a "disarm and leave it to the police" argument with that evidence in recent memory it will go down in the history books as one of the great political accomplishments of the 21st century. Anyone who ever argued in favour guns in self defence was talking at least in part about moments in history like these.
It's not crazy to understand that limiting firearm access to law abiding citizens will provide an upper hand to criminals who couldn't care less about breaking laws, with the number of firearms currently in the U.S.
This is the kind of thing that gun advocates like to tout as "a priori" knowledge. However, "criminals" respond to incentives just as all people do. You need to make the incentive to not own a gun stronger than the incentive to own a gun. Weak gun laws currently make it very easy to obtain a gun without any permits or background checks.
There's also a false dichotomy between law-abiding citizens and criminals. Anyone who has always been law-abiding can commit a crime, and if they own a gun, there's a much higher chance that someone is killed as part of that crime. There's a much higher chance they kill someone accidentally, and that someone is often a member of their own family. And a higher chance that they will successfully commit suicide. These are all facts when comparing gun owners to non-owners.
The government should disincentivize persons from owning guns no more than it should disincentivize persons from voting, from associating, or from speaking, etc.
