In 2015, there were roughly 8700 gun murders in the US. Not "homicides," which would include self-defense and suicide. Murders are the main thing we should be concerned about. People who are killed in self-defense need to be shot, and depressed people can kill themselves quickly with shoelaces or Hefty bags. We can't ban everything a person could use to kill himself.
It's very bad to lose 8700 people, but people like John Lott tell us the number would be much higher but for the many times privately held guns prevent murder.
Many times, we have decided it was better to send innocent military personnel to die in large numbers than to give up our rights or abandon other compelling national interests. There were several battles in World War Two which, standing alone, cost more than 8700 American lives.
Maybe we should just say civil rights, like suspension bridges, airplanes, and automobiles, have an unavoidable minimum cost in human life and ask ourselves if we are willing to pay it.
I don't think we would save 8700 lives per year by giving the gun-haters everything they want. We probably wouldn't save any, because certain segments of our population would continue to find guns and kill the innocent, and the innocent would lose much of their ability to fight back. But even if we did save 8700 lives, we would buy that blessing with our remarkable, precious civil rights. I don't think it would be worth it.
Unfortunately, many Americans don't care about freedom. They just want big-screen TV's, coarse entertainment, untrammeled sexual excess, dope, and entitlements. The notion that modern Americans love freedom is a sad myth not born out by the evidence. A certain percentage of us care, but it's probably not more than half.
This country was founded by stodgy old men with property and income. That's why we have so many rights. They knew what it was to build something, to look after something, and to have something to lose. Now a big chunk of our voters are ignorant oafs who go through life with their hands out, whining and looting. They will vote for anyone who promises them marijuana and other people's money.
Our demographics guarantee that America will remain a violent area, just like the regions that sent us our most violent people (look up El Salvador and South Africa some time). It's foolish to ignore that. Disarming every segment of society, including those that cause the least trouble, seems like a poor strategy for reducing bloodshed, but it is certain to disempower and humiliate us.
Overall, people who live in countries with gun control are busting their butts to move to bad old America, and not many of us are going in the other direction. Things must not be too bad here.
