What is the problem with banning weapons?

a legal monopoly on violence is the cornerstone of the states power. while there are definitely valid reasons to want to restrict access to the tools of violence, the state will always have that access, and if it restricts the general populations access to same, it becomes far easier to oppress them.

also, if we’re gonna ban weapons, i’d like to start with SUVs.

To make a counterpoint to all the views stated here: statistically, countries which have banned guns see far fewer gun deaths per capita than America. Gun bans work to reduce death, whatever else you may think.

The problem is that the ban is one-sided, and generally boils down to “the oppressed are disarmed but the oppressors are not.”

I’ll bite.

I believe most crime is fundamentally due to poverty. I don’t believe you can simply enforce your way out of crime. That would be extremely expensive and wouldn’t do anything about the poverty. You’d be better off giving the police funding to the poor communities. Enforcement would be unequally dished out to poorer areas, creating an oppressive atmosphere. So when people say it’s something a dictator does, it’s because it ignores the fundamental problem in order to jump straight to aggressive policing. Aggressive policing is something a dictator does.

There’s a presumption that individuals are less likely to harm themselves or others if they are denied the tools to do so.

Whether you’re dealing with demilitarization (Palestinians are currently being asked to give up any and all remaining weapons, as a condition of permanent peace with Israel while Russia is asking much the same of Ukraine) or local disarment (Reagan’s Mulford Act seeking to deny the Black Panthers the right to Open Carry) or the Lautenberg Amendment to the Gun Control Act of 1996 (prohibits those with a domestic violence misdemeanor conviction from possessing firearms) the expectation is that no weapons means a lower and less lethal instance of future violence.

Generally speaking, the idea’s popularity hinges on whether you believe taking guns away will leave you safer (because a suspect cohort is disarmed) or more vulnerable (because the folks doing disarment intend to do you harm after you’ve been stripped of a means of self-defense)

I believe weapons should be banned and that crime should not exist in the first place

Folks fearful of dictatorship can see crime as a necessity for survival in a country that has made it a public policy to torment them.

On the flip side, “weapons should be banned” never seems to apply to the police or the military. There’s a certain attitude of “if disarment makes us safer, you disarm first”.

I believe weapons should be banned and that crime should not exist in the first place.

You can move to Sweden

Some people on Reddit were talking about how only dictators would want to disarm people

“I don’t know why any individual should ever have a right to have a revolver in his house […] people should not have handguns.”

• Richard Nixon

Ronald Reagan and the NRA advocated for gun control once the Black Panthers started arming black communities. See: Mulford Act

Banning weapons is a problem if the government needs to be overthrown by its people. In places like the USA, this is increasingly obvious that traditional systems of government regulation are rapidly dissolving.

Australia had a mass shooting in 1996 and pretty strict gun control came in. Now it’s only really sport shooters (who are a pretty responsible bunch from my experience), rural property owners with a good reason (pest control largely), certain occupations like specific security (cash transport for instance), cops and military that have guns. And criminals.

We still get the odd shooting but they’re pretty rare and to my understanding, almost never done by legal owners.

I’m not sure what things were like back in 1996 but I don’t believe we really have the gun culture so there’s not much opposition to gun control by the majority.

At the end of the day, people like to own guys and there is a very profitable industry that wants to keep it that way.

Well, there are 2 problems with banning weapons that I see

One. Weapons are dead simple to make. I can go to the hardware store and buy everything I need to make short range, single shot firearms, and this doesn’t even take into consideration how dangerous slings and sling shots can be when used as a weapon. Additionally, more than a few full auto sub-guns have been made by folks in their basements or sheds, with admittedly mixed results. Turns out that the magazine is actually the hardest part of a repeating firearm.

Functionally, it’s an impossible task. Weapons are generally the simplest of physics problems to solve. Just ignore safety and you’ve got t weapon.

Two. Lets say you succeed. Short term, what changes? A few less deaths, but overall crime goes up because the risks go down and you haven’t done anything to address the true causes of the crime in the first place.

Long term, you have even bigger problems if people from outside the community that has banned weapons, suddenly view you as weak and helpless. And this also discounts the possibility of your own community leaders suddenly deciding to attack in order to seize more power for themselves.

This is a difficult topic because on the one hand I don’t believe banning weapons addresses the root problems of violence in the first place (access to automatic weapons in the USA has decreased yet mass shooting are way up), but at the same time recent events have shown that despite being the most armed populace in the world, U.S americans refuse to even lift a finger while people are being ripped off the streets and shoved through concentration camps.

An armed people can still be a docile people.

I will mention though, even with bans- it is extremely easy to produce automatic firearms both conventional and 3-printed. I’m not convinced that a ban would be effective at hindering mass shooters in the U.S. We can bring up the statistics of other countries that lack the same firearm access of the US but I’m not sure those are apples to apples comparisons given the differences in material conditions.

I’m in favor of armed revolution. In socialist society, we wouldn’t really need weapons as much.

people should not have guns, noone needs them and the places without guns all seem to do fine without them, while it can even be observed in the us curretnly how having guns does nothing to protect you from facism. Only a strong legal system does. In mexico it can even been seen what other the us guns law did to other countries.

guns dont offer safety, only escalte violence.it should be the contranband the police and border security should focus on, instead of a needless war on drugs.

some guy with a gun wont win against a state ever, The weapons are way to advanced. This could been seen in the middle east for the last decades when fighting “terrorists”, and even these were better equiped than anyone who just has a gun.

these gun people delude themself into thinking it would be safer for them if they had a gun, while they are fighting the danger they are themself creating