Who is opposed to gun control

You can argue both sides until you are blue in the face, but the way this country's government acts I want to be able to protect those I love and my property. I also believe that this country has turned away from the concepts that made it great. The media has been complicit in this by promoting "headline" horror stories to increase market share or to scoop others. The latest shooting has just as much or more to do with the mental health crisis in this country than guns, but let's blame an inanimate item and not the user.

It's part of the failure to make people take responsibility for their actions that is condoned by politicians and media both. To truly fix societies problems is our greatest challenge, using a type of firearm to blame ALL societies ills is not going to solve anything.

If you are not promoting a broad fix to a social problem then you are promoting a narrow "headline" grabbing stance, then on to the next"headline". Americans are letting others think for them i. People need to think for themselves, the most underused human organ these days is the brain. The reader says:.

To give you an example of why the gun people disagree with you, consider something you do enjoy: Flying. It then gives them the added benefit of being usable for home protection and the admittedly whacked out perspective that they will fight the oppressive government should it ever come to that.

Again, the last is probably ridiculous, but it is a psychic benefit important to many people; the home protection aspect is real and the enjoyment of shooting is real. You would probably say that all may be true, but is not worth the deaths. Again, lets compare it to flying, something you love. Every year, roughly people die in general aviation accidents. For rifles total, not AR rifles alone, but total rifles, the latest year had people murdered.

To put this in context, there are somewhere around 5,, AR style rifles in circulation, meaning in any given year, there is at most about 1 murder per 20, AR rifles in By contrast, there are roughly , private planes, so that would equal 1 death per planes.

So from a purely statistical standpoint, private planes are about 80 times more deadly than AR rifles. I realize that these stats are not apples to apples and if you include suicides and accidental deaths the AR might be as deadly or more deadly than private planes although on a per unit basis, I would say owning a plane is far likelier to kill someone than owning an AR. But imagine if the government took these statistics and banned private planes and non-commercial aircraft.

What would your response be? Could there have been as many deaths? You are now prevented from doing something you love and you only do it because you love it, there is no economic case to be made for private planes because some evil act committed by someone unknown to you. But I see no use to private planes; I think there is no reason for people who are not commercial aircraft carriers to fly, not to mention the vast and ridiculous subsidies private planes receive.

Again, God forbid the Vegas shooter flew his plane into an airliner which is actually quite difficult to do, but you get my point. None of those regulations can prevent that sort of act. And as many people have mentioned, with million guns in circulation, regulation is largely futile; the focus should be enforcing current laws IMO.

I like to shoot guns for enjoyment and use them for personal protection and the only AR I own is a 22LR which on a good day can kill a large rabbit, but seriously think the left focuses on symbols scary looking guns in the gun debate rather than facts. I appreciate the reader laying it out in this detail. Here are two obvious differences in the plane-versus-AR comparison, from my no doubt biased point of view:. Several years ago near my then-home airport, the Montgomery County Airpark in Gaithersburg, Maryland, a private jet crashed, in bad weather, into a nearby house and killed a mother and two children who were inside.

In addition to killing the pilot and two others aboard the plane. This was so even though the airport had been up and running many years before the nearby subdivisions went in and people moved to the area. The episode was horrific—and rare. But in the course of an average year, very few of those episodes involve anyone on the ground. Democrats favor more gun restrictions regardless of where they live , but there are still some differences by community type. In times of uncertainty, good decisions demand good data.

Please support our research with a financial contribution. It organizes the public into nine distinct groups, based on an analysis of their attitudes and values. Even in a polarized era, the survey reveals deep divisions in both partisan coalitions.

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Facts are more important than ever. In other words, gun control proposals designed to decrease fear have the opposite of their intended effect on those who view guns as symbols of personal safety, increasing rather than decreasing their fears independently of any actual effects on gun violence. Such policies are therefore non-starters, and will remain non-starters, for the sizeable proportion of Americans who regard guns as essential for self-preservation.

In this essay, it is further argued that persisting debates about the effectiveness of DGU and gun control legislation are at their heart trumped by shared concerns about personal safety, victimization, and mass shootings within a larger culture of fear, with polarized opinions about how to best mitigate those fears that are determined by the symbolic, cultural, and personal meanings of guns and gun ownership.

It likewise suggests a way forward by acknowledging both common fears and individual differences beyond the limited, binary caricature of the gun debate that is mired in endless arguments over disputed facts. For meaningful legislative change to occur, the debate must be steered away from its portrayal as two immutable sides caught between not doing anything on the one hand and enacting sweeping bans or repealing the 2nd Amendment on the other. In reality, public attitudes towards gun control are more nuanced than that, with support or opposition to specific gun control proposals predicted by distinct psychological and cultural factors Wozniak, such that achieving consensus may prove less elusive than is generally assumed.

Finally, the Dickey Amendment should be repealed so that research can inform public health interventions aimed at reducing gun violence and so that individuals can replace motivated reasoning with evidence-based decision-making about personal gun ownership and guns in society.

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