Mass surveillance? That will not end well. There is historical precedent and plenty of speculative fiction to persuade us away from this path.
Too much crime? You need 24/7 surveillance to cut that. No crime to speak of? Let’s put cameras all over the place to keep it that way.
Wouldn't it make law enforcement a lot more difficult and dangerous if the police didn't have guns?
Unless you didn't mean ban guns, but rather to give them exclusively to the police and military. Is that what you're suggesting?
There's this overriding myth that's been stoked by Hollywood et al that a "good guy" with a gun can just shoot everything up to save the day. There's no surprise what this narrative maps onto in the real world, where the results aren't predictably written to entertain.
Can you reference any incidents of people with guns using them to stand up to the police or military in recent (~20 year) history, in USA - and winning (whatever that might mean)? Any armed political protests? Any hint of a serious suggestion that a group of armed civilians could take on the US military and military-weapons-armed police forces if it came to a fight?
Armed civilians don't mean civilians stand a chance against the police or military. They're outnumbered, outfunded, out-trained, out-equipped and whatever the out- equivalent of the state having sheerly more options, is.
You're missing the point of an armed population and its ability to fight tyranny.
First of all, the military has almost nothing to do with any of this. Tyrannical regimes have to maintain order at a hyper local level, which means either by police or police-like forces.
Secondly, it has almost nothing to do with going "gun to gun" and shooting out a winner. Level of violent escalation and public support for the regime is the name of the game. When a population is disarmed a government can make political dissidents just disappear in the middle of the night without a sound. When there's even a possibility of an armed population it means if they want to take out opposition they're rolling up with armored vehicles, swat teams, choppers, the works. This sort of event gets noticed! It requires an explanation. It means live coverage, newspapers, choppers, etc.
How many bloody shootouts can a regime survive while retaining public support? How many Wacos could the US have had and still maintain social order?
I agree with you about educational programs but anything that shifts the power balance away from people and to the government (or "society" as the proponents of these things will say) is not going to help, it will just create a rift that makes full time criminality more attractive to marginalized people (e.g. London) or a dystopian nightmare (e.g. Xinjiang) that may have low crime but is a terrible place to live your life.
Whenever people start proposing things like mass surveillance, banning guns, or other things that are completely incompatible with cultural ideals (which those things are in the US) in order to solve a problem that should be a tip-off that a metric has become a target.
If anything's gonna change that, it'll be the current crop of kids coming up seeing shootings on the news, then having scary-real shooter drills every year at school. With maybe a side of increased youth suicide rates meaning more of then know someone who shot themselves. It's even spooking the kids in fairly red areas, excepting pretty much exclusively the kids of, ah, very red parents with the gun-related bumper stickers to prove it.
FWIW I think the drills are doing a lot more (psychological) harm than they're worth, but one side-effect may be a sharp change in our national attitudes toward guns, over the next 30-50 years or so.
I have lived in parts of the country where there are extremely high rates of gun ownership and 0 problems with gun shootings. Then there are areas with much less gun ownership and very high shooting rates. Those areas, to be blunt, are generally low-income PoC neighborhoods. The leadership at the country/state/city level won't admit they don't give a shit about poor brown people. They want to blame the troubles of the neighborhoods on firearms and take those away.
I have a theory that mass shootings are a similar situation, that there is a shift in the mental health of people that is causing them to want to go kill a bunch of people just to kill a bunch of people. It's currently fashionable in certain (typically) young white disillusioned male communities to go buy a gun and go kill a bunch of people. If there were no guns, would that problem disappear? Or would they just use the kinetic energy of 4000 lbs traveling at 25-60 mph to accomplish the same thing, like in Paris? I don't know.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/means-matter/case-...
Inherent deadliness, ease-of-use, availability, ability to abort mid-attempt. Guns score high(/low?) for all of these if you keep guns in your house.
I'm not sure if those statistics matters for the gun control that is discussed in the US. A single-shot hunting rifle/old revolver can be used for suicide just as easily as an AR-15. The latter would be banned with many forms of proposed gun control, the former I do not see ever being banned/legislated-away in the US.
After you saying "conflating things that are not related" you hand-wavingly compare "young white disillusioned males" shooting up a school with .. a 37 year old French-Tunisian on a watch list of authorities, pledging allegiance to ISIS and driving a van filled with explosives into a crowd.
That is not "accomplishing the same thing" or in the same way or by the same people.
Find a "school shooting" equivalent - after all if that was equivalent it ought to be happening already in USA even with guns available, oughtn't it? More high schoolers have access to vehicles than guns right now. How can you say "I don't know" if it would happen when it .. is not happening?
To respond to your comment, I'm talking about methods to go kill a bunch of people. One of those is using guns, and it seems to be the favored method in the US at the moment. However, it is not the only way, the Paris attack (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Nice_truck_attack), was more deadly than any mass shooting I'm aware of in the US and used a lorry.
Nearly everyone over 16 in the US has access to a tremendously deadly weapon in the form of their car. I'd argue it's easier to go run over a ton of people with your car than go buy a gun to shoot them up. My theory is that it is fashionable with the psychos of the moment to use a gun. If you take the guns away, what happens? Do they go to cars/trucks, do we have a return to fertilizer pickup bombings? I'm not sure, and that's what worries me about gun control measures -- no attempt to address root cause. Humans have been coming up with ways to kill each other forever. We legislate away one -- cool. What about the other ways? Haven't addressed the problem of people wanting to go kill a bunch of other humans for seemingly no reason at all beyond fame/notoriety (what seems to be many of the shooters' motives).
Did they ban guns in Chicago and Baltimore? What was the effect?
This particular line of thinking is not very well thought-out as it naturally leads to “well, then we just have to ban them everywhere” which of course is the opposite of what those mocking gun bans want.
They need to start with not associating a 12 gauge with a 5 round magazine the same as an AR-15 with 30 rounds of hollow tips.
Common sense is what is needed.
Common sense has no place in outrage culture!
So how come the 'next door' with plentiful guns doesn't have a gun problem?
Who says they don't?
Gary, Indiana isn't exactly paradise.
-selective enforcement;
-persecution of minorities;
-suppression of political rivals;
-inherent asymmetrical concentration of power into the established elite;
-history of abuse by totalitarians;
I'm genuinely unable to wrap my head around taking a pro-liberty stance on one issue and a pro-authority stance on the other. Yes, criminals abuse our common freedoms, but governments have always had vastly greater ability to abuse their power. And crime is already marginal, and falling!