Australia had a mass shooting in 1996 and pretty strict gun control came in. Now it’s only really sport shooters (who are a pretty responsible bunch from my experience), rural property owners with a good reason (pest control largely), certain occupations like specific security (cash transport for instance), cops and military that have guns. And criminals.

We still get the odd shooting but they’re pretty rare and to my understanding, almost never done by legal owners.

I’m not sure what things were like back in 1996 but I don’t believe we really have the gun culture so there’s not much opposition to gun control by the majority.

Some people on Reddit were talking about how only dictators would want to disarm people

“I don’t know why any individual should ever have a right to have a revolver in his house […] people should not have handguns.”

• Richard Nixon

Ronald Reagan and the NRA advocated for gun control once the Black Panthers started arming black communities. See: Mulford Act

Banning weapons is a problem if the government needs to be overthrown by its people. In places like the USA, this is increasingly obvious that traditional systems of government regulation are rapidly dissolving.

a legal monopoly on violence is the cornerstone of the states power. while there are definitely valid reasons to want to restrict access to the tools of violence, the state will always have that access, and if it restricts the general populations access to same, it becomes far easier to oppress them.

also, if we’re gonna ban weapons, i’d like to start with SUVs.

To make a counterpoint to all the views stated here: statistically, countries which have banned guns see far fewer gun deaths per capita than America. Gun bans work to reduce death, whatever else you may think.

The problem is that the ban is one-sided, and generally boils down to “the oppressed are disarmed but the oppressors are not.”

This is a difficult topic because on the one hand I don’t believe banning weapons addresses the root problems of violence in the first place (access to automatic weapons in the USA has decreased yet mass shooting are way up), but at the same time recent events have shown that despite being the most armed populace in the world, U.S americans refuse to even lift a finger while people are being ripped off the streets and shoved through concentration camps.

An armed people can still be a docile people.

I will mention though, even with bans- it is extremely easy to produce automatic firearms both conventional and 3-printed. I’m not convinced that a ban would be effective at hindering mass shooters in the U.S. We can bring up the statistics of other countries that lack the same firearm access of the US but I’m not sure those are apples to apples comparisons given the differences in material conditions.

The reason you shouldn’t been weapons is very simple - you can’t.

Look at alcohol prohibition in the early 1900s. Virtually all alcohol production, storage, transport, sales, and consumption were banned. And what happened? Did people stop drinking? Did crime go down as predicted? No, quite the opposite. Crime went up because criminals now had a market for illegal goods. Prohibition was where organized crime got its real foothold in the USA.

Same thing is true with weapons. If you ban weapons, all of the law-abiding people will turn theirs in, and the criminals will not. This does not improve public safety. In fact it reduces public safety because now the criminals have weapons and the means to acquire more weapons, whereas the law abiding citizens are unarmed.

There’s a presumption that individuals are less likely to harm themselves or others if they are denied the tools to do so.

Whether you’re dealing with demilitarization (Palestinians are currently being asked to give up any and all remaining weapons, as a condition of permanent peace with Israel while Russia is asking much the same of Ukraine) or local disarment (Reagan’s Mulford Act seeking to deny the Black Panthers the right to Open Carry) or the Lautenberg Amendment to the Gun Control Act of 1996 (prohibits those with a domestic violence misdemeanor conviction from possessing firearms) the expectation is that no weapons means a lower and less lethal instance of future violence.

Generally speaking, the idea’s popularity hinges on whether you believe taking guns away will leave you safer (because a suspect cohort is disarmed) or more vulnerable (because the folks doing disarment intend to do you harm after you’ve been stripped of a means of self-defense)

I believe weapons should be banned and that crime should not exist in the first place

Folks fearful of dictatorship can see crime as a necessity for survival in a country that has made it a public policy to torment them.

On the flip side, “weapons should be banned” never seems to apply to the police or the military. There’s a certain attitude of “if disarment makes us safer, you disarm first”.

I’ll bite.

I believe most crime is fundamentally due to poverty. I don’t believe you can simply enforce your way out of crime. That would be extremely expensive and wouldn’t do anything about the poverty. You’d be better off giving the police funding to the poor communities. Enforcement would be unequally dished out to poorer areas, creating an oppressive atmosphere. So when people say it’s something a dictator does, it’s because it ignores the fundamental problem in order to jump straight to aggressive policing. Aggressive policing is something a dictator does.

Well, there are 2 problems with banning weapons that I see

One. Weapons are dead simple to make. I can go to the hardware store and buy everything I need to make short range, single shot firearms, and this doesn’t even take into consideration how dangerous slings and sling shots can be when used as a weapon. Additionally, more than a few full auto sub-guns have been made by folks in their basements or sheds, with admittedly mixed results. Turns out that the magazine is actually the hardest part of a repeating firearm.

Functionally, it’s an impossible task. Weapons are generally the simplest of physics problems to solve. Just ignore safety and you’ve got t weapon.

Two. Lets say you succeed. Short term, what changes? A few less deaths, but overall crime goes up because the risks go down and you haven’t done anything to address the true causes of the crime in the first place.

Long term, you have even bigger problems if people from outside the community that has banned weapons, suddenly view you as weak and helpless. And this also discounts the possibility of your own community leaders suddenly deciding to attack in order to seize more power for themselves.

I’m in favor of armed revolution. In socialist society, we wouldn’t really need weapons as much.

The world should not have crime. And in such a world, guns would not be needed (excluding for sport).

To play devil’s advocate and get the conversation going (please don’t down vote), the idea is primarily coming from US citizens whose constitutional amendment states that the right of citizens to keep and bear arms should not be infringed. The idea behind it is self preservation (the right to live and defend yourself) and fight against government tyranny. Which, given the origin of the US, that last one is of valid concern. It’s not about the love of guns (though many do), but upholding that amendment.

The oppositional approach as I understand is if guns are illegal, there will be no mass shootings.

I don’t have an answer. I don’t have any guns, and I hate hearing about shootings. So here’s some questions to consider:

• Will laws banning firearms work against criminals? If not, who now has all the guns?
• How would we handle cases of tyranny where the government controls all militia?
• Those who intend to kill, assuming that can’t illegally obtain a gun, will they still kill? (Homemade explosives, mass stabbings, probably more) If killing people is already illegal, then how will making guns illegal make things any different long-term?
• Given the high percentage of shootings being gang on gang violence, which is illegal by the way, will new laws help?
• Statistics is complicated. Cars kill way more people, do we outlaw them? Knives kill people, do we outlaw those too? How do we measure statistically what laws will work and what won’t?
• How do you outlaw and then remove 400,000,000 guns in the US?

It’s complicated, genuinely. But people argue about it so vehemently that no ground is ever gained in the conversation. I think both sides are in favor of not killing people, but want to go about it in different ways.

The problem with banning weapons basically boils down to “weapons already exist.”

Bad actors have them and will not give them up voluntarily. It’s very simple to say “they should be banned,” but short of Star Trek-level scanner technology, it’s impossible to find all of them. If everyone else gives them up, then the bad actors essentially run the show.

If we were somehow able to ban and dispose of all existing weapons, another problem presents itself: namely, weapons can be created or improvised from other items. 3D printers can make guns (yes, really), knives are a standard and critical kitchen tool, baseball bats are recreational equipment, even pencils have been used as deadly weapons. “Banning weapons” requires banning essentially anything heavier or sharper than a balloon; and even then, you could suffocate someone with it.

Imagining that we were somehow able to do away with all things that could be weapons, as well, we are faced with a third problem: that during the time that we’re making this change, law-abiding countries and citizens will be disarmed, while criminal elements will retain their weapons.

Conservatives and gun nuts (particularly in the US) deploy this weapon on an individual level (“when guns are criminal, only criminals will have guns”), but it’s much more salient on a governmental level: to wit, when you are invaded by another country, you’re going to have to have your own weapons to counter theirs. And the promise of police (while debatably realized) is that they wield weapons to protect unarmed individuals from violence carried out by criminals with weapons.

Some people on Reddit were talking about how only dictators would want to disarm people.

They’re wrong that only dictators want to disarm people, but they are right that dictators have a vested interest in banning weapons. A resistance is a lot harder to put down when that resistance is armed.

The reality, though, is that this particular talking point was encouraged by the American NRA (National Rifle Association), which masquerades as an organization for firearm owners and users but is actually a professional organization of firearm manufacturers. It has spread to other countries from there.

I believe weapons should be banned

Should be? Yes. Can be, safely? Good question.

and that crime should not exist in the first place.

Everyone thinks that. That’s why we call it “crime.” It’s named that because it’s stuff we don’t want to happen, so we get together and assign a penalty to everything we don’t like and call them “laws.”

Okay, everything above is not my opinion, but reality. That’s the state of the world, and the logical outworking of the state of the world. What follows is my opinion. As you may be able to tell, I am a U.S. citizen, so my answer is based largely around that context.

We have to significantly ban and restrict and curtail weapons: sale, possession, and use. Dramatically. Especially firearms. Particularly especially military-grade weapons.

It should be essentially impossible for private citizens to own firearms, and those who are allowed to own them must provide a valid reason (“collecting” working, non-historical weapons is not a valid reason) and be subject to a background check, registration, psychological evaluation, extensive training, and mandatory safe storage requirements. They should be required to join and maintain good standing in their local National Guard or other defense organization. Individuals who currently own firearms and are unwilling or unable to comply with the new regulations must surrender their weapons or face imprisonment for the sake of public safety.

In line with that, ordinary police and private security firms should not be permitted to carry weapons more deadly than a nightstick and pepper spray; with more psychological evaluation and extensive training, perhaps a taser. Firearms should be exclusively allotted for specific use cases, such as animal deterrence in communities near wilderness areas, and perhaps SWAT teams. Qualified immunity should be abolished, and every person killed or injured by a police officer’s weapon should result in immediate suspension of the officer, pending an external audit and investigation.

All weapons and ammunition used by any private citizen, police officer, private security employee, or military personnel should be subject to strict check in/check out regulations, and should include a valid reason for checkout associated with specific training activities or a specific, single incident requiring their issue. Government employees (members of law enforcement and the military) and private security employees should be subject to mandatory bodycam activation (with the footage declassified) any time weapons are checked out.

That is what can be done now, safely, without unduly endangering individuals. We know that it can be done, now, safely, because many other countries have done it.

There are absolutely legitimate places and reasons to ban weapons (i.e. schools), but we need to have weapons as communities and individuals in the short term to defend ourselves against monsters, in particular capitalists.

I’m just going to put it this way.

People will find a way to be violent.

So we take away their guns, what are we down to? Sharp weapons.

We take away their sharp weapons, what are we down to? Blunt objects.

We take away those, what’s next? Creative ways people can get with non-conventional ways of harming others.

What then? And if we somehow regulated that or controlled it, people can get violent just by their hands alone.

The point again of the matter is, people WILL find a way to get violent, even if you take everything from them such as weapons.