I guess what I'm trying to say is that gun violence is a far larger issue than terrorism. I'm not saying to ignore terrorism, only that the threat is being blown VASTLY out of proportion in the US. I may change my mind if terrorists start launching daily rocket and suicide bomb attacks here, but I think we all know that the odds of that happening is virtually nil.
Your argument that there's no point in gun control because guns already exist is simply disingenuous, and it ignores the fact that not only are new guns being added to the population daily, but that there is virtually no real effort going into preventing them from getting into the hands of the people who absolutely should not have them. People keep saying that since existing gun control laws don't stop events like San Bernardino, then gun control shouldn't exist, and that's insanity. You may as well argue that people still murder, so laws against murder shouldn't exist; that people still commit ra**, so laws against ra** shouldn't exist; that laws against child molestation don't stop child molesters, so those laws shouldn't exist. None of those laws, after all, prevent the crime either; they simply punish offenders and attempt to deter people from committing them in the first place. But somehow, for no logical reason, gun control laws are different? Horse crap.
Nor am I saying that gun control is some magical panacea that will solve all of America's problems. It is simply the legal equivalent of bandaging a wound to stop the bleeding long enough to get the victim to the surgeon so he can remove the bullet fragments and try to repair the damage. The base problem is that America glorifies violence and always has. It's literally everywhere, from our slang to our television to our legal system. It's perfectly acceptable to beat someone up for calling you names. We have 'wars' on this and that. We demolish tough odors and kill bugs dead. Our most popular shows and movies tend to have enough violence to HORRIFY our European neighbors at the same time we baffle them by our reactions to a woman daring to show a breast on TV. Our most popular games are about warfare, murder, and criminality.
And now we have celebrities calling for all liberals to be executed. We have presidential candidates spouting the Nazi party line, only about Muslims rather than Jews. We have people firebombing Mosques, people executing black churchgoers because they're black, and, yes, religious extremists shooting up a workplace. We have cops ventilating 12 year-olds with their hands in their pockets because they're afraid the kid has a gun. We have criminals going around ambushing cops, children shooting up schools, and people carrying assault rifles into K-Mart just hoping someone will try a robbery so they can play hero.
Do I think somewhat stricter gun control will fix all that? No, but I know damned well ignoring the problem altogether will do even less, and that's all that praying about it is. Closing those few loopholes, however, may save LIVES, and survey after survey has shown that actual gun owners overwhelmingly SUPPORT closing the known loopholes on background checks, the only real subset of gun owners opposing it being the diehard NRA fanboys. The *ONLY* reason that gets shot down every single week is because GOP senators need to keep earning their NRA paychecks.
The only real solution here would be for America to give up its violence fetish (and I'm as bad as any - I love my war-based strategy and role-playing games, my movies like Terminator and Avengers, and tv shows like NCIS), but that kind of change requires both a political will that isn't there and decades to enact, and that just isn't going to happen.
So yeah, I'm going to continue trying to apply bandages until we can find the surgeon.
