(This is ***not ***a 2nd Amendment, Constitution or gun policy thread - this is just asking for personal opinions.)
So the poll option is binary: Either America as it is currently is at the moment, or America without any private citizens (whereby good citizen or crook) having any guns at all - only cops and soldiers have guns. No in-between option; which would you prefer? (Everything else about America - culture, politics, society, entertainment, values, attitudes - remains completely unchanged.)
I’m a gun owner, but as a society we’d be better off with strict gun control.
Which isn’t realistic, but it would require confiscating all the guns and destroying them, then passing very strict legislation so it is very hard to buy a new one.
If we did that, most of our gun problems would go away.
I’ve never bought the argument that we need guns to be free. We need a free press, checks and balances, free elections, etc to be free.
And if a government ever does become tyrannical, handguns won’t make much of a difference. Explosives are far more effective and those are still everpresent.
What exactly is the point of such a ridiculous false dichotomy? The number of people who actually want “no private ownership at all” is so vanishingly small that I’d be shocked if anyone here votes for that option.
ETA: and then I go and click on the poll…
Are you kidding? This is the internet. If somebody made a poll here that exclaimed “Should America even exist?” a good 25% of the people would probably vote “No” even if they lived there.
I went to vote in the poll and both options suck. I think gun ownership is a reasonable privilege to allow. I do not want ‘America as is’
This is purely fantasy, but if I accept the hypothetical, then yeah, sure. I’d feel sorry for the hunters and other recreational gun users, but IMHO the good would outweigh the bad if this could happen.
(I’m taking this at face value: not only would no one own guns, they wouldn’t have access to them, whether or not they owned them.)
Only about 25% of Americans even own a gun. About 3% of people own half the guns, another 22% own the other half.
It isn’t like everyone here owns guns. Its a small minority who even own them, and an even smaller minority who are ammosexuals.
yeah, this poll is butt. I don’t want guns banned, but I’m not averse to talking about measures to keep them out of the hands of people who shouldn’t have them.
Count me as another unwilling to vote in this one.
I voted for private ownership, so long as there are stricter background checks, no large magazines, no private sales and strict liability for what happens with your gun.
That’s not one of the choices.
And it’s not as though there aren’t other countries where the people have made the choice to ban private gun ownership almost completely. It’s the current U.S. attitude to gun ownership that’s the extreme outlier.
I think it’s an interesting question, trying to separate out the ideal state from the pragmatic question of how you could actually get rid of the guns in circulation even if you wanted to.
Perhaps it’s better framed like this:
Suppose you married a British person and emigrated to the U.K., where private gun ownership is almost completely illegal, and where obtaining illegal guns is also difficult. So the status quo is pretty much the “no private gun ownership” option in the OP. Now suppose there were a referendum on gun ownership. Would you vote for a change to the kind of unrestricted gun ownership we have in the U.S. (i.e. allowed by default unless you are a felon etc.)?
Option 1. I’m not going to punish 99.99% gun owners because of a few bad apples.
Likewise, Option 1. Since defensive gun uses number in the hundreds of thousands to millions per year, and gun crimes significantly less, and since recreational hunting is a major source of revenue, and motivation, for environmental maintenance, on a strict cost-benefit analysis ISTM to be a straightforward calculation. Not everyone wants or can be a bow hunter, and not every shooting of an intruder is of an armed intruder, so eliminating the private ownership of guns isn’t going to make enough difference to matter even if it is on both sides.
Of course it’s an impossible hypothetical - if the military has guns, they will be stolen or sold or otherwise transferred, and smuggled in as well, but as long as we assume one impossible condition, we can deal with it as if nothing else changes.
Regards,
Shodan
As others have stated, the choices in the poll fall into the fallacy of the excluded middle. Therefore I voted “America as is…” because I do not believe in a total ban on gun ownership.
Oops.
In my opinion, where the poll falls short is allowing for hunting rifles, which aren’t typically the problem when you make the common sense distinction that people don’t honestly hunt animals with automatic or semi-automatic assault weapons, nor are they practical for criminal activity. But I’ll concede those guys could, like Bo and Luke, switch to bow and arrow hunting.
I voted No Guns based on the strict criteria of the poll. I’m not a big believer in the idea that I’m going to overthrow a tyrannical government with an AR-15 and the poll specifically states that no one privately owns a gun, including criminal elements. So the notion of needing a gun for personal defense or “But now only bad guys will have guns” is truncated. Hunters can become acquainted with the bow and crossbow. Arguably, even the police wouldn’t need nearly as many guns or to carry them as standard procedure if we know none of the criminals have guns. This would also significantly neuter the drug cartels that now would have no guns in the United States and could not get any firearms from the United States.
It’s not the real world option I’d actually go for but it’s the better poll option than continuing in our current state.
Living “in the country” a gun is a sometimes-necessary tool just like a shovel, post-hole digger, etc. That said, our current situation is obviously broken.
I did not vote in the poll.
Just FTR I don’t want America as it is OR complete and total bans on all private gun ownership. If I have to choose between equally unpalatable options though I’ll pick the first.