Weapons are tools too. Mostly to scare away an attacker before they strike but sadly sometimes also to strike back.
Double sadly they also come with the possibility to strike first.
But in the choice of us being armed and Russia and China and the middle East being armed or everyone being armed except us I take the first option. Every time.
Edit to add: modern weapons are actually about reducing the chance the skin is melting of children.
It is fully possible to think that your country should have access to the best conventional weapons possibly while still voting for politicians that want us to stop weapons sales to madmen.
Think: if you try to remove all guns overnight the ones you get is the ones from the good guys. If you make guns illegal only criminals will have guns.
Also: the biggest crimes against humanity have typically been made by the local rulers: Hitler can be discussed, Stalin, Pol Pot and a number of others cannot.
Good guy with a gun tends to hit a bystander, or cause dangerous escalation in situations that don't warrant it, or have their gun stolen.
> If you make guns illegal only criminals will have guns.
That's one way to look at the very short term. But then since "criminal" is not an immutable quality of a person, millions of people that weren't criminals that then commit a crime will have no gun.
Trying to sort people into "good guys" and "bad guys" is a terrible idea in general.
It doesn't matter what you call the groups, or even how many groups you come up with. The point is that some are more compliant than the others - the conformists, the law-abiding etc - and it's those that you'll disarm first. The ones who don't actually care about the laws beyond the extent to which they can be meaningfully enforced will retain the means for violence. The only way to pretend-break this recursion is to outsource the violence (e.g. to the police and the military), and then claim that the rest of society is peaceful. But that's a sham - if you back a law that ultimately results in a cop enforcing it breaking the nightstick on someone's back, you're complicit in that act of violence.
The goal isn't to pretend there's no violence, the goal is to reduce the number of violent deaths.
And the police are going to need some weapons whether or not you have gun control.
So sure, some groups are more willing to give up guns than others. And we should perform a cost/benefit analysis while keeping that in mind. Plans don't have to meet some standard of ideological purity before we can evaluate them.
Weapons stopped Hitler. Weapons stopped USSR. Weapons stop US. Weapons stop todays Russia.
Weapons are tools too. Mostly to scare away an attacker before they strike but sadly sometimes also to strike back.
Double sadly they also come with the possibility to strike first.
But in the choice of us being armed and Russia and China and the middle East being armed or everyone being armed except us I take the first option. Every time.
Edit to add: modern weapons are actually about reducing the chance the skin is melting of children.
It is fully possible to think that your country should have access to the best conventional weapons possibly while still voting for politicians that want us to stop weapons sales to madmen.