[rootusrootus]

Pretty easy to make glib comments like that. How do you propose the problem be addressed? The Constitution as written makes banning guns a non-starter. So amending the Constitution is step 1, and a big step it is. 3/4 states ratifying is a non-trivial threshold. And then what? There are already more guns than people in the US. Going to confiscate them all? Good luck.

Even Australia, the poster child for instituting draconian restrictions in response to tragedy, has vast numbers of illegal (and legal) weapons still in civilian hands. So clearly that isn't the answer.

So I want to know what your easy solution is.

[defrost]

> Even Australia, the poster child for instituting draconian restrictions

It has certainly always been painted that way, particularly in US media driven by NRA framings.

An alternative description might be that Australia simply (almost but not quite) made gun regulation uniform across all states and territories.

At the time of the Port Arthur massacre all the states with larger populations had gun regulation, much like they had car and truck regulations - paperwork on ownership, licencing, etc.

Two relatively low population states, Queensland and Tasmania, had no regulation and territories had zero to mixed regulation.

Following a then world record lone shooter event in Tasmania the public pretty much overwhelmingly supported uniform regulation across the country- which meant imposing much the same laws as were then current in Western Australia on the alternative reality of Queensland.

Much of the buy back went towards buying back old guns and unused extra just in case guns that owners decided weren't actually worth formally licencing and paying annual fees (like a car rego) for.

The result of near uniform gun regulation across the country, all sales tracked, etc. was a decrease in gun incidents and two decades of near zero mass shooting events.

[femto]

> So clearly that isn't the answer.

Quite an assertion.

What Australia is doing works by one measure that matters: number of people killed by a gun. In 2024 the gun murder rates were:

US: 4.5 per 100,000

AU: 0.09 per 100,000

Ratio: 50

Source: https://www.ussc.edu.au/by-the-numbers-stark-contrast-in-aus...

Australia didn't confiscate vast numbers of guns by violence. It introduced a buyback scheme, which a lot of gun owners took up. The buyback was "an offer they couldn't refuse" for classes of firearms that were banned, but once it was done it meant it was more tractable to keep firearms in check. The big thing is did was reduce the number of households that contained a firearm even if some of the remaining (paranoid?) license holders increased their number of guns.

Source: https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2021/04/28/new-g...

[rootusrootus]

> Quite an assertion.

You must have misunderstood the assertion, then. I will attempt to clarify.

- Australia tried to get rid of guns, still has millions. Several hundred thousand of them illegal.

- Australia has a much lower firearms homicide rate, despite still having quite a lot of guns. Not the same ratio as the US, sure, but 4.5M guns for 28M people is still fairly prevalent and available.

- So the rate 1:50 ratio is not easily explained by simply reducing the number of guns in circulation. Something else is going on. Something harder to solve, even, than the second amendment.

[femto]

Okay. I should have interpreted it to mean "So clearly that isn't the full answer". I interpreted it to mean "So clearly that isn't part of the answer".

I think reducing the "saturation" of guns is important, as it is a big driver of people's mindset, whereby they see a gun as an answer. By "saturation, I mean the number owned, their availability, their visibility, their promotion and so on. The US is a standout in ownership, in that it has almost twice as many civilian firearms per person than the next closest country [1]. I suspect the US is also a standout in the other areas: availability (Walmart, but less than before), visibility (open carry), promotion (NRA).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g...

[defrost]

> Australia tried to get rid of guns,

False. - Gun regulation was made considerably more uniform.

Here is my actual IRL Australian neighbour legally shooting here in Australia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7owwTz7Z0OE

[NikolaNovak]

The two statements are not inherently contradictory.

Removing / reducing / "doing something about guns" may well be hard, and it is beyond fascinating to many of us that majority of people / politicians / entities in USA do not want to do it.

In fact, I would say two statements are even complementary - your statement that doing something about guns in usa is hard, is because / as a result of original post that (bewilderingly) most Americans don't want to do it.

(Somehow, turning children schools into dystopian fortresses with metal detectors and armed teachers and security guards and turn stiles and gun drills, pervasive surveillance and trigger-twitchy responses and now drones, is... More freedomy? Liberty, Fuck Yeah? Dunno...)

[rootusrootus]

> it is beyond fascinating to many of us that majority of people / politicians / entities in USA do not want to do it.

A lot of us do, I think what happened is that a majority have decided it is a political loser. It reliably spins up republicans and gets them to the polls, probably even more so than abortion. It costs a lot of political capital with near zero hope for meaningful action. So progressives have prioritized issues with broader appeal (and still somehow fail most of the time, despite what appears to be much broader appeal).

> turning children schools into dystopian fortresses with metal detectors and armed teachers and security guards

In some places. That's perhaps part of the issue. My suburban schools lock the doors, and that's about it. No metal detectors or turn stiles. They have like two security guards for a thousand students and no cops, just a liaison at the local PD if something comes up. The school does not feel like a fortress, nor a dystopia. So this gets written off as a big city problem.

Which poses the question, is it predominantly a big city problem? What fraction of gun violence in school is gang violence? The AR15-wielding mass shooters get a lot of press, but if we want the violence to drop meaningfully then we are probably wasting time over-focusing on that. And then the question, will taking guns way from the gangs solve the problem? Or do we have a socioeconomic and culture problem? Talk about hard to solve.

[soco]

Maybe it would be time for us non-Americans to finally accept and move on. Accept that most Americans are totally fine with their kids getting murdered at school, gun violence on the streets and whatever else. And that wearing vests on the streets, living in fortresses and giving up communities is the future they at least accept, if not straight-out favour. As much as we like to yap here, they're adults in a democratic country and fully able to choose what they want.

[lambdaone]

Interpreting the Second Amendment in a sane way might be a start. Its wording seems clear to me: it establishes the need for a well-regulated militia as necessary to the security of the state, and grants the right to bear arms in that context. No aspect of the current situation is "well-regulated", nor are citizens, apart from a tiny number of fringe groups, organized into militias, and those that are could scarcely be called well-regulated.

However, the current intpretation seems to be solely in terms of the end of that sentence, "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed", with no context at all, and I think in a way that has a quite different meaning to what was intended.

And yet, when you come down to it, the right of the people to bear arms is not absolute and is "infringed" all the time in that sense; you don't allow automatic weapons to be used without special licenses, you don't allow small children to buy guns, you don't allow felons to own them. So it seems that the right to bear arms is not totally unrestricted; it's just a matter of where you draw the line, and I think the first part of the 2A is clear about the context in which that line was meant to be drawn.

I don't have any issue with an armed citizenry for national defense. Look at the Swiss; they are legally required to be armed, but in a highly regulated fashion, exactly so they have a citizen army ready to roll at any time.

This seems to me to be what the founders had in mind, not a free-for-all in which guns are available to all in an uncontrolled way.

[rootusrootus]

The founders didn't think we ought to have a standing army, either, and a militia of ordinary citizens was their answer. So I guess first we will need to bring back militias made from ordinary citizens, first, and then we can debate how that changes the applicability of the amendment. Not to mention the definition of well-regulated, which I think (hope) most people interested in this issue understand.