Why is 'gun violence' so dire that it deserves its own category, relative to other forms of harm?
Why do we discuss it a lot? Because it's one of the most obvious issues in the US, compared to other advanced countries. We have shootings every day in many major urban centers, we have school shootings periodically, which people find especially awful...
And because there's a lot of political debate around it, and it's at the forefront of many political elections and campaigns.
It's a huge deal, and it's very dire; get caught up on this.
Do they think people would replace guns with knives? What makes them think that people wouldn't just give up?
People in general are pretty clever. If you take away someone's means to do something without addressing what motivated them to do that thing, they're likely going to figure out a way to do it anyway. (See: censorship, DRM, drug prohibition)
At least this is how I feel.
Remember that taking away guns reduces crime.
Anti-gun control people actually agree with pro-gun control people on this point when they describe gun control as a means of a tyrannical state to pacify the populace, because, they warn, the lack of an armed populace makes it more difficult to commit violence against the state. This is a rationale codified into modern interpretations of the Second Amendment.
By extension, a populace less able to commit violence against the state is equally less able to commit violence against itself.
Really, both pro and anti gun-control people want a safe and secure society (excepting of course the lunatic and criminal fringe) but they disagree as to the role of guns in providing that safety and security. Unfortunately, it's become kind of a matter of religion for each side, so discussions which aren't fraught with hyperbole, strawmen and willful ignorance are difficult to have.
These two "religions" are irreconcilable; the pro-gun control group has, since at least the '70s when I started closely following this and being an anti-gun control activist, made it crystal clear that many of them will not be satisfied until they've taken all of our guns (or nearly so, e.g. the over and under shotgun class like Biden, what e.g. the U.K. has devolved to at the same time they've reversed the trend since the 13th Century of decreasing interpersonal violence). In return, we've made it clear that we know our 20th Century history, if they get very far in this, we'll kill them, wholesale and retail. No common ground possible there.
Second, this is part of a larger cultural war. We need look no further than now President Obama saying in 2008:
You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.
And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
Third, there have been some major changes in gun owning demographics, purposes and the like, part of what some call Gun Culture 2.0, and it really started becoming a thing post-9/11, when the Federal government made it clear we were on our own. The other part is a rapidly graying society as the Baby Boomers reached middle age and now retirement age. For whatever reasons, a very large fraction of them are turning to guns for self-protection, e.g. the vast majority of people in my 2008 Missouri CCW class were obviously middle aged or older.
There's also been some massive changes on the ground: starting in 1987, "shall issue" or better concealed carry regimes have swept the nation, such that they hold in all but 7 states, and cover 72.6% of the population. Issued licences are now growing by more than a million per year, the numbers are astounding, and on a percentage basis have reached 5-10% of the population in shall issue states.
In the same period, "Constitutional Carry", i.e. no permit required, went from 1 state, Vermont (which simply never restricted it post-Civil War) to 10, with 2 being added in the last month or so, and perhaps more to come this year. That's now 7.2% of the above percentage. See this with nice graphs here: http://onlygunsandmoney.blogspot.com/2016/04/every-picture-t... (although I'd add that DC, MD, and NJ are de facto no issue states (for a demonstrated serious need, MD may issue for the duration of the threat), even if the law allows it; also, many local units of CA, MA and NY are de facto shall issue or thereabouts).
Put another way - if you could snap your fingers and make every gun in the u.s. Disappear, you would solve the gun violence problem, and undoubtedly reduce the incedence of violent crime, but not completely, and then the question becomes by how much? Which is not easy to answer - especially if we were to translate that to a real world hypothetical
There does seem to be reasonable evidence from other countries that reduced accessed to guns (and certain types of guns in particular) does have an impact.
Guns just make it ridiculously easy to kill a lot of people in a hurry. It takes a lot more strength and determination to plunge a knife into someone (perhaps several times) when compared to pulling a trigger.
I can't think of many forms that happen to be performed by a mechanism designed and manufactured, by man, for one purpose: to kill? Protected by a nation who appears to love God. Who apparently said Thou Shalt Not Kill?
Utter hypocrites. The lot of them.