I am a gun nut and I will not apologize for that. I don't have my guns because I am necessarily preparing for any sort of uprising, but I was taught how to use firearms as a young adult and I like having them. In my community almost everyone has guns and for an outsider, going to our Wal-Mart might be a bit of a frightening experience since 50% of the people in there are probably armed and many of them are open carrying. This means they have a firearm with them and are not hiding the fact that they are doing so.
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While this might seem low-class, wild west, or even crazy to a lot of people out there, this is the way we live in my county and nobody who lives here is afraid of it. We also simultaneously have an extremely low crime rate across the board. Think about it: Are you going to try to rob a store where half of the customers are carrying lethal force with them? Of course you aren't. You'll move on to some liberal city where the population doesn't have any guns and go your robbing there.
The argument against guns comes up in the media on a regular basis and for the most part it is brought up by politicians and activists who don't actually know anything about firearms other than the fact that the weapon is capable of killing.
With the Kyle Rittenhouse trial going on right now the usual voices advocating for gun control are quite silent this time around because it is proving very difficult for them to vilify this guy who defended himself from attackers who initiated the problem in the first place and would still be alive today if they had not decided to do so.
The same is true of everyone that I know who owns guns - which is almost everyone that I know locally.
There was a series of signs along the side of the road that I saw when I was a child and it said this
"If you criminalize gun ownership then only criminals will have guns"
This is something that I think gun control activists are just willfully ignorant of: Of all the hundreds of people that I know, most of which own guns, none of them have criminal intentions with their guns but they will use them if and when the time comes if their own lives are threatened. Other than this very unlikely situation, the only time they ever use their guns is on a gun range - which by the way, is a lot of fun.
I live in North Carolina and we have some of the "best" gun ownership laws in the country. We have open carry, concealed carry, and castle doctrine and because of these things we don't really need a police force. We also don't have mass murders taking place in the streets because it wouldn't be possible since the people that a criminal might be thinking of gunning down are going to be shooting back.
Criminals don't obey laws. Therefore if gun control is enacted the only people that will abide by it are the people that were not going to break the law anyway. So this being the case, what the hell is the point of these restrictions?
I too find the gun control debate to ignore several really important aspects of the discussion such as the major one being what you said about non law-abiding citizens not really being all that concerned about legality of weapons.
One time many years ago I was working somewhere in Illinois when a jealous ex BF of the girl I was dating a while ago being very threatening towards me and her. This is a rather country part of the nation and there is always concerns that someone is going to stab you or something. I knew a few rather dangerous people at the time and one of them asked me if I wanted him to "get me a gun with nothing on it" meaning that the gun would be untraceable to anyone least of all me. He said it in such a way that it wasn't even a difficult thing to accomplish. The restrictions that we currently have would have had no effect on this purchase nor would new ones.
Of course I didn't take him up on the offer, because I am not a psychopath.
Glad to hear this and herein lies the root of the entire situation. A good guy with a gun doesn't indiscriminately shoot people because they tend to have respect for the law, even if they don't agree with that law.
But also, people who try to connect the dots on just any ol' information would probably try to say that if the government took away all guns that the "gun with nothing on it" that you refer to wouldn't exist. But anyone with a bit of sense knows that isn't true.
Just look how easy it is to get your hands on illegal drugs! Do these morons really think that guns would be any different?
I am glad to hear that there are some counties around that are exercising their freedom.
The point is to eventually disarm the populace. Take a look at what's happening right now in New Zealand and Australia. I don't think it will fly in the US and I am glad for that.
The Australia example had died down a bit in recent times for obvious reasons related to Covid tyranny, but that was always a go-to point when people were just cooking the books as far as statistics were concerned in order to try to make an untrue point about how less weapons means less death. They focused on the huge drop in gun-related murders but conveniently skipped the part about how murder rate was around the same, it was just performed by different means.