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All of those guns are for different purposes. The .223 is a cheaper, lower-performing round compared to say a .308. It's also more fun to shoot (less recoil, semi-automatic), and it is a tiny bullet (same diameter as a .22, so not dissimilar to a fairground gun most likely). But people do sporting events using all sorts of different calibers.
Personally I think the .223 is a very good varmint round, and that's how I've used it.
To be clear, when I say this, I mean "it should be legal to own deadly things" and that's about how I took your phrasing. Most pro-gun-people (including me) don't support it being legal to execute people randomly, but perhaps my phrasing was...unclear. But, to your point, at least in the US, they think that the Second Amendment is an important backstop to liberty. It's hard to tease out the correctness of this, but the US of A is doing much better than Europe in this regard. (For instance, just as a wacky example, in A/C unfriendly Europe, heat deaths kill more people than firearms in the US of A. It arguably wouldn't actually be a good swap for the US to get European gun violence levels if it also meant getting European attitudes and regulations towards air conditioning! And that's without getting into values-based stuff like free-speech rights.)
I'm not sure what the organization has to do with it. Alcoholism is much more dangerous problem in the US than firearms, but alcohol is much easier to procure (and is also glamorized in the media, much as guns are!) If all of the gun-rights orgs shifted their focus to sporting, I doubt that gun control groups would be assuaged, because at the end of the day their goals are things like "stopping school shootings" not "stop optics we don't like."
I mean - most popular fictional depictions of guns are of people, often those who are legally permitted and encouraged to have them (cops, spies, soldiers, etc.) using them to stop bad people. I don't really see why that's bad - presumably even Europeans want their military, soldiers, spies etc. to do their jobs.
The specific fantasy you seem to be upset at is "killing a bad person who is trying to do a bad thing." Most gun owners who are interested in self-defense are interested in self-defense. Movies and gun manufacturing ads and the NRA website and all of those things you're discussing aren't promoting the idea of unlawful violence or mass shootings. (It's actually imho the liberal-leaning press and gun control groups that do the worst to spread mass shooting memes, because they amplify the contagious meme of mass shootings to advance, in the case of the latter, their policy agenda). They are promoting the idea of stopping a bad guy. You can go read the NRA magazine, they (at least used to. maybe they stopped) pull accounts of robbers, rapists, mass shooters etc. getting stopped by "the good guy with a gun" which happens pretty often, honestly. If there's a fantasy here, it's specifically the same fantasy that people who join the military or police often have. I think it's fine to criticize certain aspects of this but fundamentally wanting to stop bad people from doing bad stuff is an honorable impulse.
It seems to me that you are making the vibes-based argument that "Hollywood thinks gun violence is good therefore guns are bad" but my argument here, on the whole, is that if you look at actual use cases and not vibes vast majority of use even of guns that are e.g. derived from military designs is for peaceful purposes. The same way that most drinking isn't to die of liver failure even though that's a not infrequent outcome.
Man, don't shoot the messenger here. I'm trying to explain my understanding of an ethos here, not grandstand about it being my position. Either way, the thing is that the rule against killing is, again to a first approximation, fairly absolute; and to someone who actually believes in an absolute rule, asserting that you actually want to break it in a fairly broad special case is not persuasive. Going with my previous metaphor, you may be saying something to the effect of "but they only want to have sex with minors who are really asking for it" - the difference just does not matter to those who perceive sex with minors to be intrinsically wrong, no matter the details, and a lot of people in Europe also likewise perceive killing to be intrinsically wrong, no matter the details. There is really a complete disconnect of moral intuitions here, with both sides finding the other barbaric - if the story is "Texas home owner shot robber who was running away with his TV", classical Americans will be cheering, while Europeans (+Europeanised American urbanites) will be cheering to lock the home owner up. Can you muster the theory of mind to understand that some people actually believe that there are no "bad guys" who it is a good thing to kill?
It's complicated. I think a decade or so ago the answer from a narrow majority actually would have been "no", if that job involves actual killing. Now, some of them still will say "no", many more will prefer to not think about it, and many will think something to the effect of "yes for external enemies, but this is not a principle on which you can run a civilised society internally". I'd imagine that even people who are deep in pro-UA brainrot territory in countries like Germany would more often than not balk at the idea that counterintelligence should kill Russian spies inside Germany.
I'm not so convinced that they are strongly correlated at all - East Asia has ubiquitous AC but no guns and an atrocious free-speech situation compared to Europe as well, Russia flip-flops but at least intermittently had quite liberal gun laws with no relation to its AC or speech situation. Either way, the heat death figures you refer to always seemed fairly cooked to me - Eurocrats have an incentive to inflate them to support the climate change narrative, while the US figure seems pretty inappropriately small for its burgeoning homeless population.
Ha! No, like I said, that's definitely not my ethos. But I hear ya.
Sure, this makes sense. And of course Americans often don't believe in this at all (even when it comes to executions and the like).
Yes. And I think you're right, there's an incommensurability problem that plausibly is only worked out on civilizational timescales.
I am also not convinced on the correlation, but I will note that I think civilizations are very different and a causal chain that exists in some cultures may not exist in other cultures at all. Sometimes just the idea that something is true makes it so.
I also suspect Europe's free-speech situation is, at least in some respects and specifically in some places, about as bad or perhaps even worse than Russia's – it looks like England might be in some ways worse than Russia, arresting 12,000 people in 2023 while Russia detained about 20,000 people since 2022 as per this 2024 article as part of crackdowns on anti-war speech (note that these don't measure convictions, and of course note also that Russia has nearly three times the population, but also that the article I pulled was focused on the Russian anti-war crackdown and might not measure people taken in for other views.)
I think it's pretty rare for ~healthy adults to die from heat stroke (some of these numbers might be due to aging European demographics) and a lot of the American homeless are in pretty temperate places like California. I believe US cities generally have lots of places for homeless people to get out of the cold, or ways for them to travel to more temperate regions. If I had to guess, most exposure deaths among the homeless involve drugs of some kind. But that's a guess.
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Moreover, this fantasy is in large part a response to another fantasy failing to become a reality, that of police being able to keep you safe if someone intents to hurt you or your loved ones.
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