Sounds about correct, give or take. And I do agree that ultimately any gun control law is ultimately going to boil down to “Is the gunhaving worth the cost ?”. Which most people outside the US think you guys are really nuts about the cost analysis, but you do you.
That said, and perhaps paradoxically, I really don’t reckon your main problem with gun control lies with the 2nd. It’s vague and weirdly worded enough that you could take a crowbar to it any which way ; and in fact you have since e.g. fully automatic weapons have been federally banned before and a number of weapons are very heavily tracked and controlled to this day (AFVs, high explosives, etc…). So there’s clearly precedent for ‘nfringin’ ; it’s just a matter of votes and support.
To my mind, the real-er hurdle lies with the simple nature of y’alls federation. That is to say, it’s almost tautological that any city’s, county’s or even state’s gun control measures is utterly pointless since anybody can just drive a truck over the stateline, fill 'er up with guns and ammo then Smokey & the Bandit it up back home without very much hassle. Which, BTW, is what makes gun nut arguments like “See ? D.C. has super stringent gun regulations and they still have tons of gun murders, CHECKMATE gun grabbers !” silly and specious. No, for any gun control measure to ever have a chance to work it has to be enabled and enforced at the federal level ; but then you run into the giant problem of the “Nuh uh, STATE’S RIGHTS !” brigade and getting reluctant States to enforce it properly ; and I wish you guys good luck with *that *shit.
That is always the ultimate case. It’s up to the voters and society to determine if the perceived cost to benefit is worth it. It’s how all societies judge risk and cost balanced against what they want/need. In other countries, other calculations are made. Often, what they allow causes as many or more deaths than the same thing in the US because of how societies accept risk or cost (in lives) weighed against what the citizens want.
In the US the majority of citizens still feel that a personal right to keep and bear arms is something they want, and thus the perceived benefit of that outweighs the cost in lives, be they from suicide or from murder or accident, etc. Until and unless that changes, it’s what we gots.
Who cares about the base rate? And you are repeating what I apparently wrongly strawmanned: you don’t think suicide booths would have a long term effect on suicide rates.
I don’t know if there is some tipping point in ease and accessibility of suicide that would significantly increase the suicide rate but I doubt it.
If you had an abortion clinic in every town so that it was already reasonably accessible to anyone that wanted one, do you think the rate of abortions would significantly increase if there was an abortion clinic on every corner or would the level of abortion remain relatively stable as soon as it became reasonably accessible?
If suicides were driven by the availability of guns, you would expect that a country that has more privately owned guns than people like the USA would have a sky high suicide rate. But among economically developed nations, our suicide rate has historically been average compared to other economically developed countries. It has been rising lately but it’s hard to say it’s because of greater accessibility to guns.
I think it’s hard to make the argument that guns are causing an epidemic of suicides.
That was a few decades (1989) ago, so it’s gonna be hard. I found this:
and this:
*Putting close to 1,500 gun owners in legal jeopardy, state Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer has decided to drop a court fight defending his predecessor’s controversial practice of registering semiautomatic assault weapons declared illegal by a 1989 state law.
The decision means that the owners of almost 2,000 UZIs, AK-47s, AR-15s and 72 other types of assault weapons will face a fine and imprisonment if they do not turn in their guns, destroy them or take them out of California…He said the decision is unfair to gun owners who registered their weapons. “Everyone thought they were complying with the law and doing the right thing,” he said…Officials in Lungren’s administration said they registered more than 16,000 assault weapons after the March 30, 1992, deadline. They said many of them were weapons that owners submitted just a few days before the deadline but were not processed until afterward.*