[Ancapistani]

Further, if guns were banned tomorrow, there are a significant number of people who would instantly become criminals.

It feels like many who advocate banning guns severely underestimate the importance of the issue to the other side.

[nonbirithm]

Yes, it seems like the gun issue in the U.S. is cultural. You couldn't make the same arguments for gun ownership in the U.K. or Japan, because gun ownership was not as strong a part of the culture the whole period since their founding. It took two mass shootings in the span of a decade for the U.K. to ban almost all gun ownership.

I would prefer if nobody had guns (as an unrealistic utopian ideal), and if people were disincentized to obtain them illegally. But repealing the Second Amendment is both a lost cause and would do more harm than good. There is no undoing centuries of cultural propagation and convincing tens of millions of people who have already accepted the idea to cooperate.

If I wanted to minimize my chances of encountering gun violence as much as possible, I'd have to move overseas.