I don’t think that is helpful. We don’t even know how many guns we have - it is at least 300 million. Might be double that. And, as far as being used by a jerk to harm an innocent person, essentially zero of them are involved. Seriously - it’s a rounding error to zero, a tiny tiny percentage of under 1%. Same for the percentage of gun owners who do something untoward with their guns to another person.
Assuming the 2nd Amendment stays in place, and I can not see it being overturned, we are going to have tons of guns. We are not going to have significantly fewer guns even if we tried programs to turn them in for cash, and criminals are always going to have access to guns.
For what it is worth, I see a few opportunities:
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Overturn the idiotic Republican efforts to bar the CDC from developing a robust gun violence database. We need the best available and best verified information.
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As far as I have been able to determine, most gun violence comes from inner city zip codes associated with narco business and gangs. If we legalize drugs, perhaps we can significantly reduce the narco business. It worked with Prohibition and Al Capone.
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We have way too many school shootings, and at the same time we have well-meaning people (who I think are misguided) actually fighting the idea of tightening security in schools. I don’t see why schools are not offered the same security features every public building in the civilised world enjoys: limited ingress through metal detectors and monitoring of all egress points. You can’t shoot up a school if you can’t sneak a gun into it.
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We need to somehow work with responsible gun owners to see what else we can do. Not all gun owners are nuts. Most are not. And almost all of them are responsible gun users. We will never have a good national conversation about guns if we can not stop our binary thinking about the issues.
