My point was that a gun doesn’t make you more safe, but the opposite. Anyone talking about buying a gun shouldn’t be discussing safety, they are unrelated concepts.
You're [deliberately?] misinterpreting the stated intent of the law. A gun that goes off when dropped is substantially less safe than a gun which doesn't. People who buy guns are in fact justified in considering such factors.
I think there's a real case to be made that the Californian law is duplicitous and is actually intended to reduce the availability of handguns in California, but that's not the point being raised here. The point is that for some reason Californian cops are exempt from from the law. That's like exempting cops from the lawn dart ban, it makes no sense.
I don't know why you're jumping to nuclear weapons as your analogy when gun control laws in other countries make a far better comparison point. Australia is probably a good example here: they have urban and suburban centres in the cities, but they also have vast rural areas. Guns are not banned but limited and regulated. They do not seem to have had this issue where people have been left defenceless by crazy people with guns.
In fact, are there any countries that have implemented gun controls that have had this problem?
Australia didn’t have that problem before they banned them either.
For countries with major issues who do have strict gun control? Off the top of my head, Mexico, Brazil, South Africa. Plenty more if I looked, I’m sure.
If I could snap my fingers and make all the guns disappear tomorrow, I would. Until then, I've looked down the barrel of another man's gun and been attacked by neo-nazis and the police have disappointed me every time, so I'm gonna carry my own.
They were a group of local teenagers and young adults with a shitty little clubhouse along a trail in the woods with some swastikas painted on it. They tried to corner me and my friends with what ended up being air guns with painted tips (since I wasn't into firearms at the time I completely thought they were real) because they thought we got too close to it. They probably weren't part of any organized nazi gang, but when they identify their property with swastikas, I'm gonna call them what they pretend to be. The police took and melted the air guns, but it didn't go any further than that. They've still got their hunting licenses, judging by their Facebook pages.
The other incident with a real gun I was referring to was a man pointing his revolver at me while I was picking up his daughter for a date, talking about how a man has to protect his daughter. At that point, I wasn't even scared so much as I was concerned what I was getting into. But since he didn't directly threaten me I was told that it was "negligent use of firearms" at worst, and didn't want to push it.
Whatever your ideology it seems a little craven to not want guns that happen to be out in circulation to be as safe as possible from incidents like misfires from accidental dropping.
The market failed to innovate on safety for years. And the issue with a market based solution is it can be much cheaper to just not include any of those safety features.
Some things can be below your personal risk tolerance, but be well above the acceptable risk tolerance at a social level.
The market based approach states that if the demand is there, supply will come online if profitable. In this case it doesn't seem like the cost is more than $100-200 incremental, which isn't outlandish.
If enough people buy unsafe firearms and then are subsequently jailed for negligence, or the companies are sued out of existence, I would imagine the safe version would organically emerge.
Harm reduction is not a single tactic. For gun safety harm reduction means requiring guns not to fire by accident, AND having gun owners take training that includes all the information about the risks that go up once you own a gun (especially to others in your household), AND requiring or encouraging gun owners to lock their guns up AND to store ammunition separate from guns AND ideally even to store them somewhere not in the house, AND reduce the number of guns in circulation.
When it comes to drug abuse, harm reduction can mean providing clean needles and other supplies to the user. The person isn't going to stop just because they're denied clean supplies. In the same way that you can't stop people from acquiring guns, but you can help prevent them from purchasing guns that are fundamentally unsafe to operate.
No, you literally cannot stop people from acquiring guns in the United States, as it's baked in the Constitution. Please make arguments based in reality.
I agree with all of the points you just made, and don't wish to be anywhere near a gun, personally. This does not change the fact that there are some people that feel the opposite, and will obtain a firearm regardless. If I can, I'm going to incentivize them to choose the safer option.
I think there's a real case to be made that the Californian law is duplicitous and is actually intended to reduce the availability of handguns in California, but that's not the point being raised here. The point is that for some reason Californian cops are exempt from from the law. That's like exempting cops from the lawn dart ban, it makes no sense.