THE POLICE PROBLEM

Maybe we focus too much on the concerns of relatively few gun owners and too little on the victims. Bringing a weapon into a city creates more risk for more innocent victims, and that’s not ok

I tend to agree with this. I really wonder what kind of regulations could be put into place and enforced without abuse by police (who ignore guns on their friends' hips but use it as an opportunity to take out minorities accused of being in gangs)

This has to be part of it.

"Nobody in the entire country having any gun for any reason" is a necessary part of any form of gun control? I don't think I agree with that as it seems a bit hyperbolic. Or am I misunderstanding your context?

But a lot of those accessories make mass shootings easier. While one innocent victim getting shot is a tragedy, it’s not as bad as 4 or 20, or any larger number

Heat compensators make mass-shootings easiers? Recoil compensators? What they do is make collateral (or self-) damage harder. I DON'T understand the bills that come after heat compensators one bit, but I also struggle to see how recoil compensators are problem-contributors. If someone were shooting up my building, as terrible as that would be, I'd prefer they had a recoil compensator. They would be less likely to hit more people, while not actually being more likely to hit their target.

It has to. In my state guns are also harder to get and that’s reflected in much lower gun ownership

When I'm in a "police abuse of power" group and see people looking to drastically increase police power (and/or federal police power, since I live in a fairly left-leaning state as it is) I get scared regardless of the topic. You also point to alcohol - but I think that analogy fails because there's somewhat limited federal regulation on sale of alcohol as long as you're not selling to minors. My (again, "liberal") state lets towns assign liquor licenses basically as they see fit, and you can buy alcohol on almost every street corner.

For efficacy, you bring up "when someone can visit a Walmart over the border". This doesn't seem workable to me. It's not that there's a Walmart in the next state, it's that you can buy a gun in the next state without training, a background check, or any other validation. I'd actually use this as an example of the "throw paint at the wall and hope" form of legislating my side does on gun control that we will not do on any other topic. We KNOW what will work. We can't get what will work to pass, so we spend months talking about other things that both won't pass and won't be effective. What will work is to stop the wrong people from buying guns by making them show they're not the wrong person before they do.

True, but there’s a vast quantity of illegal guns already out there, and you can’t control illegal sales. You can make those more expensive to use, and maybe some won’t

How much more expensive? Are we talking $20/bullet? That won't stop violent crimes or most mass-shootings. Are you talking $200/bullet? That's going to prevent legal gun owners from actually knowing how to use their gun. Remember, far more people die from gun accidents and suicides than homicides. Raising the price of the bullet is unlikely to decrease homicides, will not affect suicides, and is likely to increase gun accidents drastically.

A homicide takes just one bullet. Practice and training takes thousands. The increase of price will disproportionally affect the desire to be a responsible gun owner over the reduction of gun violence altogether. If anything, increase the price of guns while offering waivers for a first gun of someone who has been background-checked and lives in certain "right to farm"-style communities.

Side 2 of this. A lot of people make their own ammo. Not exactly hard. It's currently more expensive than buying ammo, but home-made bullets are not unlikely if that changes. They ARE more likely to do spectacularly bad things in general. And then you could try to regulate the powder (only ammo-specific ingredient), but any criminal and many DIYers could make their own powder with readily available ingredients.

I understand the urge and there are certainly good reasons, yet I don’t think the statistics really bear that out. For all the news about police shootings, the vast majority never do

I'll leave police accountability questions to everyone else in this group that I am sure will come running to my aid. That said, how do you suggest small towns without a police force budget for police? Let's say you live in a town that has had zero gun violence in the last decade and has not found the need for a police force (I did for several years!). Now you seem to be suggesting they budget out salaries for enough officers to replace all the people who use firearms to protect their farms from wildlife. What would be a reasonable response time for those police if an animal starts wreaking havok and killing pets/livestock? When I lived in that town, the Fire (only local service) response time was still 15 minutes.

Not a "gun rights" point, but I'll make it. Police are a hammer. They do a few things VERY well. But no matter their training, they will always be inferior at everything else. In the US (and many other countries), we use police for those other things anyway. With all due respect, in no reality is an armed man with a gun the right first person to de-escalate a verbal domestic dispute. Paramedics deal with situations that start and/or become more volitile than police on a regular basis, and most refuse to carry a firearm even if they are allowed.