Speaking personally, the level of dishonesty involved makes it difficult to come to the table with open arms.
I do own guns and I believe strongly that people should be allowed to own them with few restrictions. I realize this might trigger an automatic "conservative" response but it should be noted that while I am many things, conservative is not one of them. I've been a radical leftist and an activist for the better part of 20 years and my position on firearms has evolved over time to what it is now.
When someone says "I don't want to ban guns, I just want common sense laws" I have a hard time taking it seriously for a couple of reasons.
First, what they're proposing may not be an outright ban but it's another layer of laws and restrictions that's going to be added to every time something happens that scares people. Little by little, the rules will pile up until it's impossible to legally own a firearm and abide by the rules. It'll create a de facto ban the same way anti-abortion groups are attacking women's health clinics that provide abortion services; chip away at them little by little and nitpick every law until it becomes too difficult to operate legitimately and they close.
Second, the people proposing these laws don't seem to understand what "common sense" actually means. Every time I've had this conversation I get solutions that are:
unworkable or otherwise physically impossible
already in place
illegal
so vague they mean nothing
not actually able to address the underlying problems
Thus far I have not yet had one single person give me a good example of a "common sense" law that doesn't fall under these categories. And much of it comes from simply not knowing how guns work or the laws around them.
There's an uproar when a political figure says that abortion should be banned or that climate change isn't real but then says something mind-numbingly stupid and shows they haven't the slightest clue what they're talking about and we're supposed to ignore what they say on the topic. Why are firearms different? Why is it ok to know nothing about guns but have your opinion taken just as seriously as someone who has been involved with them for decades?
People demand that "assault rifles" be banned but then don't see a problem with another firearm that fires the exact same round, has the exact same ammunition capacity, and can mount the exact same accessories with the only real difference being how they physically look.
There's also a really strong element of double standards involved with firearms.
Death by firearm is somehow more tragic and more worthy of attention than death by any other means. How many tens of thousands of people die from alcohol abuse every year? How many people are we losing every year from prescription drug abuse? How many hundreds of thousands of people die from smoking and second-hand smoke? We allow these products to be advertised in our media, they kill many, many people every year and yet I don't see people demanding that they not be sold or that something be done about them.
I don't see walkouts over these things or trending hashtags or people smashing bottles of alcohol on Facebook. Firearm deaths, all firearm deaths, including accidents and suicides, account for 13,000 people per year in the US. Second-hand smoking alone kills 40,000 people every year. Many of them are children.
No outcry. No calls for bans. No vitriol hurled at people who smoke.
The correlation between guns and crime is another one that irks me greatly.
Availibility of weapons has never been an issue with mass violence. There was a point where you could actually buy firearms, even fully automatic machine guns, through the mail. Literally all you had to do was send a check and you got a fully automatic weapon. No background check, no paperwork, no nothing.
Even after the state decided that maybe wasn't a great idea you could still buy firearms through the mail. Up until the Gun Control Act of 1968, you could legally and without a background check purchase firearms and ammunition through the mail.
And yet we didn't see mass shootings every other month. Why?
On top of that, much of the statistics out there don't correlate a reduction of crime to a presence of strong gun control laws in a state or even in the surrounding states. There doesn't seem to be any strong correlation between the presence of these laws and a reduction in overall violence and crime, strong indication that there are many other factors at work and that attacking one part of the equation will not solve the problem.
Furthermore the US government has investigated the effects of the 1994 "assault weapons" ban and it turns out there's no clear-cut evidence that it did much good, and that's from the government's own research.
That trend continues when we look at the oft-cited Australian example. The University of Melbourne did a study regarding the gun confiscation program and turns out the results were minimal at best.
The campaign doesn't seem to have stopped mass violence. It didn't even stop mass shootings.
Gun violence is a problem with social roots; it's more common in poor families and poor areas, mass shooters tend to be alienated, radicalized men with few social ties, depression can lead to suicide. If the war on drugs has taught us anything, you cannot handle a social problem with material solutions. We've banned the drugs, sent people to jail, spent trillions of dollars, wasted hundreds of thousands of lives, and what makes a serious dent in the problem? Legalization. Banning things you don't want people to have is a really terrible way to keep those things out of people's hands.
Yet somehow it's ok to handle the social problem of gun violence with bans and not ok to handle the social problem of drug abuse with bans.
This kind of stuff makes it hard to come to the table and have an honest exchange because I don't feel like the other person is going to respond in kind. Pointing any of these problems out gets you dismissals, excuses, insults, or a counter-point that's often just as wrong.
(more)