Call me an out of touch west coast liberal, but I personally would prefer that I don't regularly encounter people carrying a weapon capable of killing me. This isn't a war zone.
Last I checked, they still hadn't caught him. This is not a state where more guns us going to make things better. It's a state that very clearly represents the temperature of the country: financially strong liberal strongholds arm wrestling with the government around them. (Abbott and Patrick don't hold back on how much they hate Austin.) We're just going to shoot at each more and scream Castle Doctrine about it.
"But the guy didn't kill anyone, he deserves a second chance" -- right. And the rest of us deserve some safety from people like him.
You can't ban your way to more safety if you can't reasonably control the thing that you're banning. The US government can't reasonably control who has a gun in this country, that's just a fact and it will not change as long as the second amendment is a thing.
What you can do is adjust sentencing standards so that the people who are at highest risk of re-offending in a violent way are locked up.
What is bizarre? Freedom, personal responsibility, and the right to defend oneself are not mutually exclusive. Your freedom is yours to lose, and that happens when you infringe on other peoples' right to freedom.
> because they are supposedly a threat to public safety.
Strawman. You take away someone's freedom because they committed a crime of some kind and are likely to be a violent re-offender. Most likely that means they committed a violent crime in the first place, and were just lucky to not have killed someone. That sort of determination requires looking at the totality of circumstances, too, not just checking a couple boxes.
`A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.`
Your interpretation above, of an individual right to bear arms, derives from DC vs Heller ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller) which is relatively new: 2008.
It also doesn't comport with the contemporary writings of the framers, nor the fact that the term "militia" in the constitution refers to the National Guard, which was at the time imagined as a body made up of all able bodied men between 18 and 45 years old. Additionally, at the time, only men were considered "the people".