First of all I have to say that my thoughts are with the family of the police officers, it's horrible to hear such news. But as sad as these momentes are they should also be used to see how the situation can be improved.
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Originally Posted by Underdog
Was the gun that shot those cops obtained legally? If not, then I still don't get your point...
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Well, those criminals dont build guns themselves, even illegal guns were legally purchased at one point. And then either stolen or resold. Reducing the amount of legal guns available would automatically reduce the amount of illegal guns as well, and don't forget that many crimes are commited in some sort of "overreaction", and making it more difficult (not impossible) for people to get access to guns in such situations would already solve a lot of problems.
I'm not going to say that making all guns illegal is a good idea (or even possible), but it should definitely be more difficult to buy a gun than it is right now. As it was said by SeanL before, the US do have the highest homicide and gun crime rate in the western world, and it's not even close. Don't you think that making it more difficult to get a gun would slightly reduce those numbers? Just to mention it, the death rate per 100,000 population per year due to gun crime is over 10 in the US, it's about 1 in almost every western European country and 0.25 in the UK. And social problems can't be the only reason to have a 10-40 times higher gun crime rate, having such easy access to guns definitely has something to do with it.
If you look at Germany for example, it is legal to purchase a gun there. It's just not as easy as in the US. The requirements are more difficult and you need to wait a certain amount of time before you get the gun license, you also have to pass a psychological test and can't have any kind of criminal record. That system works much much better and makes a lot of sense to me, anyone who wants to be able to defend his house/life can still legally do so but a huge amount of people who want to commit a crime with a gun will be detected earlier.
Although it's obviously difficult to start such a system now as there are already a lot of guns around and in the hands of criminals, the law should have been changed decades ago. As much sense the 2nd amendment made when it was written it is just as obsolete today (or 100 years ago). It took 30 seconds to reload a gun for 1 more bullet back then, now it takes a trained person around 1 second to possibly reload more than 30 bullets. I dont think anyone thought about this when it was written. About 90 people out of 100 own a gun, that is the highest amount worlwide and almost as much as number 2 and 3 combined, there are almost more guns than people in the US. And as every statistical evidence can prove this does more harm than good.
As I said before, it would be ideal if it would simply be more difficult and ensured that responsible people own guns, and not available for every random crazy person. Other countries can make it work too, it obviously reduces the amount of homicides and non lethal gun crime. There really are no actual reasons to be against a change. It shouldnt and wouldnt be impossible to defend your life with a gun, it should just be made more difficult for others who dont just want to defend themselves to get a gun.