First off, gun homicides are actually down over 50% since the early 90s. There are still too many, of course.
Assault weapons bans are ineffective, since they account for 2% of crimes.
Open carry and concealed carry are emotional issues, but aren't a big contributor to guns deaths. 13M people are already permitted to concealed carry, and while it has led to more aggravated assaults with guns, it hasn't been a big increase.
Background checks and waiting periods actually do make sense. People with a restraining order shouldn't be able to get guns - research indicates that keeping guns out of their hands would reduce this category of murders by 10%.
Most of this is cribbed from Nicholas Kristof:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/17/opinion/sunday/some-inconv...
The former is debatable (e.g. most handgun murders aren't committed when gun stores are even open, i.e. evening and night), and as far as I know the latter, when it's domestic violence, it's the law of the land everywhere. But that's very dangerous, since it's an easy way for the non-law abiding to strip a victim of protection when they most need it, and the threshold to get a restraining order, even a permanent one, is way too low.
The first time I bought guns was from a professional couple, and they wouldn't have done it if I and my SO hadn't convinced them we were also such, and would treat them with all due respect.
Of course, no one denies there are problems at the other end, but we are talking about a Constitutionally enumerated right in an era where all Constitutional protections are under threat (yes, even the 3rd Amendment, pervasive surveillance is exactly what quartering troops was all about way back then).
I won't predict a violent counter-revolution if the nation went to mandatory background checks, like would be certain if registration became mandatory, but that would be playing with fire.
Gun laws there are confounded by so many other factors in general crime and murder rates that I doubt much useful knowledge can be discerned until some number of years pass as the city returns to US norms of gun ownership and concealed carry.
I do understand that rural areas are going to need a level of protection from wild animals that might not be required in urban areas.
My suggestion for how to solve gun violence is to put together an "Apollo moonshot" project to develop a non-lethal weapon as effective at stopping as a lethal one. Phasers on stun is my dream. Once you can stop a person without harming them you can then take a tobacco industry marketing campaign to make owning a lethal weapon unacceptable in civil society. Rifles and relevant lethal weapons should still be available outside of urban areas unless non-lethal alternatives would work.
If you don't understand your opponent, how can you ever hope to reason with him?
The most notable example of that in my lifetime was the reevaluations of some liberals on the wisdom of gun control in hit's heyday after the Saturday Night Massacre (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturday_Night_Massacre) where Nixon dismissed the Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox, and his Attorney General and Deputy AG resigned rather than carry out the order. We mostly Nixon supporting "gun nuts" were among other things part of the insurance that mess wouldn't go too far.
I wonder if this would create a risk asymmetry between people breaking the law and people obeying the law.
How do people living in rural areas with strong gun control even survive?
But seriously, absent a population of brown bears (e.g. the Grisly), I'm not sure it's that great of a problem. And many people simply don't care about the occasional child, jogger, etc. killed by a mountain lion, bear, whatever. But I consider myself lucky to have grown up in an area were humans are the undisputed the apex predators, not even any black bears in my part of SW Missouri. Got to watch out for snakes, though.
Expect that thing to be fired indiscriminately and very often by people who want to commit crimes or pull pranks, but aren't hard enough to kill.
We'd see many orders of magnitude more crimes like burglary and carjacking committed if that weapon existed.
That I'm going to potentially be "judged by 12" even if I'm not "carried by 6" weighs heavily in my mind (sort of, I've never had to make such a decision in, say, 45 years of gun ownership (starting as a kid in a gun owning family when I was trusted enough) and ~17 years of carrying concealed (as noted in a previous recent related HN discussion, avoidance is the best policy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11429446
Right. If Indiana's gun laws were to blame, you'd see similar levels of violent crime within Indiana, and you don't. The only places in Indiana with anything like Chicago-level violence are areas such as Gary (which is a Chicago suburb in all but name).
On the other side of the coin, nor do you see Chicago levels of violence in downstate eastern Illinois, which is just as close to Indiana.
Chicago has a violent crime rate of 884/100,000. Urbana has a violent crime rate of 338/100,000.
Blaming Indiana's gun laws is convenient rhetoric, but quite obviously wrong.
Not particularly any more, see my comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11464325