We can reduce sexual diseases even further by regulating who you can have sex with. If you've ever had or transmitted an STI, you're on a permanent banlist. You can obtain a license by proving you have no history of reckless behavior and have a clean record of health.

We can also reduce homelessness even further by finding every homeless person and forcing them into a government house. Homelessness is a travesty that must be reduced as much as possible, isn't it?

Hey, there aren't any ideal scenarios but we can reduce it further, can't we?

That requires much tougher questions to be asked and a level of cultural self awareness that most people don't have.

Look up the history of prohibition. People thought that they could just ban booze and that would be the easy button that would greatly reduce all sorts of adjacent societal ills.

Guns are the same way. People don't want to ask themselves why some youth are so disaffected they go postal. People don't wanna accept that gangs and traffickers mediating business disputes with bullets are basically doing a sloppy version of what courts do for "real business" disputes with extra steps. People don't wanna ask why so many people are taking their own lives. So they bury their heads in the sand and advocate for various flavors of "ban the guns and everything will be happy." Would it have some marginal impact? Certainly. Will it have the impact that advocates say? Lol.

More realistic scenarios, based on historical examples, include:

1. Armed resistance of local or federal authorities/law enforcement (e.g. Battle of Athens, Bundy Standoff)

2. Guerrilla warfare against a superior military force (e.g. Afghanistan)

3. Full civil war between the states (would probably look something like Russia-Ukraine war happening right now)

In the first two scenarios small arms are absolutely effective. In the third scenario, access to more advanced weapons and logistics would be split between the factions (and possibly supplemented by outside forces).

You displace guns primarily harming suicidal people and criminals into harms to innocent victims, via unchecked violence — potentially without reducing suicides.

You also see an increase in totalitarian behavior, eg, the Australian lockdowns compared to the US lockdowns.

And the argument for removing rifles ignores that they’re rarely used in crimes — more people are killed by hammers or fists than rifles.

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

How's Saudi Arabia doing against those shoeless Houthis (i.e. 8 years later)?

US policy during COVID vs Australian policy during COVID.

Afghanistan and Iraq insurrections; Ukrainian militias.

Black Panthers; US labor riots; US revolution.

I think we’ve seen consistently throughout history that the first step to abusing a population is disarming them.

And there are more murders by hammer or fist than by rifle.

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

But more to your point -- I'll steal this quote:

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family?

Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?...

The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!

If we didn’t love freedom enough. And even more - we had no awareness of the real situation… We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.

― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

The decline in dead people is not correlated with fewer guns.

The decline is a trend going down over time that did not start when the guns were taken.

The argument of "fewer guns == safer society" needs to show that when the guns were taken, a decline in corpses resulted. That did not happen.

It shows exactly what I think it shows: just how much safer (or not) a place is after enacting stricter gun laws.

The whole point is that the parent tried to imply that stricter gun laws make the society safer. The data for his example shows no real correlation.

The data just doesn't support that view. Simply asserting "because I said so" is not a good way to convince people of your argument.

If you look at the numbers there over the years for actual shootings it's basically a bad weekend in Chicago.