At least nobody actually says "The founding engineers knew everything, our job is protect their original technical decisions, because otherwise our great company will fall."
Regulate guns and all these problems go away. As a bonus, you'll find out they were neither necessary nor useful for defending your rights.
Firearms are regulated in the United States. Quite heavily, in fact. This goes back to the National Firearm Act of 1934, carries through the Gun Control Act of 1968, then loops in the Firearm Owners' Protection Act (FOPA) of 1986 (which included the famous Volkmer-McClure amendment that all but outlawed fully automatic weapons for civilians) and runs through at least the Brady Act of 1993. And that's without getting into the smorgasbord of state, county, and municipal laws that also apply.
The idea that the US is still living in the Wild West era with regards to firearms is a complete myth.
> As a bonus, you'll find out they were neither necessary nor useful for defending your rights.
That's not an experiment I'm willing to indulge in personally. As the old saying goes "I'd rather have my guns and not need them, than need them and not have them."
Compared to every other country in the world, including those with private firearm ownership, the US very much is still in the Wild West.
>That's not an experiment I'm willing to indulge in personally.
You're indulging in it now. Your rights are being eroded and nullified daily by an increasingly militarized police force, an ever more pervasive surveillance state and an authoritarian government going off the rails. How are your guns helping?
I meant the experiment of further restricting firearms ownership.
> Your rights are being eroded and nullified daily by an increasingly militarized police force, an ever more pervasive surveillance state and an authoritarian government going off the rails.
On that we can agree, at least.
> How are your guns helping?
There's really no way to answer that, except in retrospective. I'll leave the final word on that to the historians who will come along well after I'm gone.
That said, I will note that it's very possible (but probably impossible to prove one way or the other) that the knowledge of how heavily armed the US populace is has in fact at least slowed the erosion of our rights, as the leaders (the ones who aren't brain dead stupid) fear the prospect of an outright shooting civil war.
And even short of a full fledged war, we have already seen cases where armed civilians confronted the government, and the government eventually backed down - even though they could have easily squashed the resisters in terms of absolute power. That is presumably again because they knew that doing that squashing would just lead to further escalation and Bad Things happening. I'm referring here to the "Bundy Cattle Standoff" or whatever they dubbed it, back in 2014.[1]
[1]: It's not my intent here to say that Bundy and his crew were in the right. Merely pointing out that being armed and willing to point guns at agents of the government ultimately led to a outcome other than them all being slaughtered. And I think they got their cattle back, or whatever it was they were trying to accomplish.