Gun Control:

Guns serve no useful purpose in modern day America.  They solely empower crazed killers to be more lethal whenever they so choose to go on their personal rampages.

I can't think of a single use for a gun in the modern age, outside of ranchers or farmers protecting their property from wolves (which, if not for environmentalists, wouldn't even be in America anymore in the first place).  If someone decides to attack you, there isn't nearly enough reaction time to go get your gun from wherever you've hidden it inside your house, load it, take off the safety, so on and so forth, before the attacker has already unloaded his gun on you or whatever other weapon he felt like using.  Unless gun owners literally keep loaded guns in their hands at all times of the day, it won't be of any use whatsoever in a fight.  A fight starts when the other guy wants it to, not you.  He can attack you when you're asleep.  When you're on the toilet.  When your hands are full.  When you're sitting down at a table and you can't even back the chair away from the table in time much less go grab your gun.  Guns as a method of self defense is a joke.  At best they're useful in the defense of others.  If one person is getting raped or killed in front of you, and you have a gun nearby, perhaps you could go get it and come back and help that person, but that's about it.  In around the same time, you could have just called the police and had them rescue the afflicted party.  Or you could have simply wrestled the guy away yourself without a gun, if you were, I don't know, a real man and not a pussy afraid of getting into a fight, like those three guys on the French train displayed.

Guns are not a reasonable argument for self defense, however, because making sure your opponent doesn't have a gun helps you just as much or more than owning a gun yourself.  It doesn't help you much if you're just walking by and a drive by car unloads on you with a machine gun.  You could have a gun in your holster all day and it still wouldn't save you.  Only the other side not owning a gun could have saved you.

The comical argument that citizens with hand guns are necessary in order to wage violent revolution against the government is also worthless.  When was the last time a citizen's brigade wielding hand guns has ever beaten a modern military with tanks, planes, submarines, nuclear bombs, helicopters, radar, night vision goggles, satellites, drones, etc?  Yeah, that's right, never.  During the revolutionary war the simple rifle was the strongest weapon on Earth and so, yes, a bunch of citizen pioneers could just grab their guns and overthrow mighty England.  That world no longer exists.  Weaponry has moved on since the 1700's.  It's time to put away the apple cider and realize it's the 21st century and your weapons don't mean squat anymore.

So guns have no benefit in self defense and no benefit in citizens' democratic revolutions.  (By the way, the most successful citizens' revolts have all been by peaceful protesters who simply voice their displeasure in the central square of the capital until the government gives in.  This works 9 times out of 10 and a lot more often than armed revolution did for, say, the Shining Path, etc.)  Even if you wanted to overthrow your government, you would have a higher success rate facing off their jets and tanks completely unarmed, singing kumbayah, than you would popping off your handguns at them.  That just gives them an excuse to slaughter you all.

There is no evidence showing that gun ownership deters crime.  Japan and Germany ban guns and they have virtually no crime.  You can't deter crime any further than they do.  There's plenty of evidence that gun ownership leads to crime.  Every single guy who bought a gun, or stole a gun from someone who did legally buy it, and then went on a killing spree to express his outrage with the world right before he blows himself away.  How many thousands of lives have been senselessly lost because we gave these people access to guns?  Their spree killing fantasies would have remained in their heads if they just weren't given access to guns.  These people aren't trained assassins who can just switch over to bombs, knives, or poison at will -- they're a bunch of deranged punk losers who can only kill in the most direct and simple manner possible -- which is a gun.  There is no easier way to kill others.  They're not going to just pick up the bow and the sword if you ban guns -- though I suppose there's no reason why you couldn't just ban those weapons too if it came to that.  Instead they will give up on their fantasies and return to playing a video game again or taking drugs after a bit of grumbling and grousing about how life isn't fair.  Thousands of lives saved.  Innocent lives of kindergartners, random pretty women who had never done anything to anyone, college students just trying to make their way in the world. Good people, being brought down one after the other by madmen carrying guns, guns we allowed them to have.  None of the culprits caught were carrying illegal to possess guns.  Or if they were, they had gotten them easily just by stealing them from family members or borrowing them from friends, who did have the gun legally.  No one used a 3D printer to build their own guns in their basement and customized killed ten people like some sort of James Bond movie.  These people simply picked up a gun in a country that's so awash with guns that you stumble over them every time you try to walk around at night.

When you have a situation where there's no possible benefit to legal guns in private citizens' hands, but all sorts of demerits, it's obvious what the conclusion should be.  Just as we wouldn't give everyone in America a switch to a nuclear weapon to use under their own discretion, no one should have the trigger to a gun ready at hand to use whenever they feel like.  People don't have the right to take lives whenever they see fit.  If someone needs to die, it can be done through a vetted authority figure who is authorized to do it by the moral wisdom of the collective society and the state.  There is no reason to let walking powder kegs be the final say on the life or death of kindergarten children.

The 2nd amendment was passed during a time when America was besieged by French, Spanish, British and savage Indians on all sides.  They needed their citizenry to be armed because that was their first and only line of defense against all military perils.  In addition, the west hadn't been tamed yet and there were still plenty of wild dangerous animals, from scorpions and rattlesnakes on up, which only guns could handle.  Plus a sizable proportion of people's nutrition still came from backwoods hunting.  There were also lots of jobs like selling furs that required people to have guns just to make a living as they hunted down their prey.  None of this still applies in the modern age.  Just read the 2nd Amendment:


"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

There is no militia anymore, nor is it in the least necessary to the security of a free state anymore, since we have the largest volunteer army on Earth and could crush anyone who opposes us in seconds.  Seeing as how the entire justification to the second half of the sentence was the need for a militia, once that justification ceases, the second half of the sentence is also invalid.  Another way this phrase could have been written is this:

"So long as a well regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

You see how much clearer and more sensible that phrasing of the amendment reads?  That's what they meant to say from the beginning, but due to having a terrible sense of word choice it all dribbled off into random grammar-less text.  Now we can simply reinterpret the amendment to mean "that day is past, so the right to bear arms is now invalid.  Case closed."  We don't even need an amendment to the Constitution to ban guns.  It says right there in the amendment that guns are only for the sake of militias, which we no longer have, so what does it matter anymore?

The entire civilized world outside of America has banned guns long ago, and they all have lower crime rates than we do.  Most importantly, they all have lower spree killing rates than we do.  Crime is almost negligible so long as it is gang bangers shooting each other.  But when innocent people are killed because someone thinks "I'm the joker!", we are simply throwing away our children onto the funeral pyre of people who just want to own guns for the sake of owning guns.  They can't point to a single good thing it has ever done them to own a gun, but they just want the right anyway.  To play with as a toy?  At the cost of human lives?  No.  You don't get to cause the deaths of others because you think going to shooting ranges is fun.  There's a limit to hobbies and dead children is past that limit.  Gun advocates don't have a single sensible argument in their own favor and just have to be raving lunatics to still be sticking to this position in this modern day and age.  It's like arguing with flat earthers or creationists.  It just doesn't even make sense why we are having this conversation anymore, after all the spree killings that have occurred recently, why nothing changes no matter how often the tragedy keeps repeating itself.  Spree killers are the most depressing stories that come out of the news cycle, and they happen virtually every week.  Every single one of these killings, every single one of them, could have been prevented if we just had the same gun laws as everyone else on Earth.  Enough is enough.  Please make the killing stop.