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Gun Rights are Civilization Rights
I believe, if you don't trust an independent adult to have a firearm you ultimately don't trust them enough to be in the same civilization or society as you.
There are three categories of people that nearly everyone agrees should not be allowed to own a firearm:
And you'll notice we generally don't trust these categories of people with much of anything. The first two categories of people we insist on them having guardians, or being wards of the state. The third category of people we imprison.
There are two major arguments against gun rights that I think hold the most salience for people.
Argument One: Guns are Dangerous and Unnecessary
They are undoubtedly dangerous. Their purpose is to be a weapon. But there are other things that are dangerous that we don't ban. Cars can be used to achieve mass casualty events. Bombs can be made with some commonly available materials. These other things are rarely labelled as "unnecessary" though. There are also plenty of "unnecessary" things that we don't ban. Plenty of purely recreational items and services exist. Jet skis, theme parks, cruises, large houses, etc (some of these things are even dangerous). Only the most hardcore socialists and communists want to take away all the fun toys.
There is an argument that gun advocates make that gun rights are necessary to keep the government in check. I generally like this argument, and think it is demonstrated by the level of free speech rights in places like Great Britain where guns have been successfully banned for most private "citizens".
But I'll grant for the sake of argument that guns are totally "unnecessary". And that it is the special combination of Dangerous+Unnecessary that leads people to want to ban it. Since other categories of things like Safe+Unnecessary or Dangerous+Necessary go largely unbanned and untouched.
I think the widespread existence of many "Dangerous+Necessary" demonstrates that we can trust most adults to handle dangerous things in a responsible way. We can't trust them 100% of the time. And we can't trust that there won't sometimes be negligence.
The "unnecessary" component of the argument is also a scary slippery slope to be on. People have different desires and wants. There are I think two steady states of being in regards to "unnecessary" things. Either you let everyone decide for themselves on every topic. Or you have a central authority that decides on everything for everyone. If you are willing to bite that bullet, keep in mind that it will not necessarily be you deciding what is necessary and what is not. I believe it is fully possible for such a bureaucracy to mercilessly strip every single joy out of life, and they'll fully believe they are making your life better. You'll eventually be sad enough that you'll come to the second main argument against gun rights:
Argument Two: Guns enable easier suicide
I don't have the data on hand, and I don't really want to get into an argument about said data. But it is my understanding that there is a noticeable and undeniable effect of guns on male suicide rates. This makes intuitive sense to me. Many methods of suicide require you to actively torture yourself for a short time period, drowning, hanging, cutting yourself, jumping from a very tall building etc. Or they present a chance of a failed suicide attempt that leaves you heavily injured, like jumping from not high enough, or getting in front of a moving vehicle, or pills. Guns make the attempt a more sure thing, and present an option that does not involve torturing yourself.
Something about this whole approach to suicide prevention feels very wrong. On an individual basis I think you should not commit suicide, and if someone can be talked out of suicide they generally should be talked out of it. But there are also some cases where I believe it is very cruel to prevent suicide. Medical cases for sure. But there are also people who have drawn a shit straw in life in too many ways. A bit too dumb, constant low level bad health, unable to figure out how to love or be loved, etc. A life of quiet misery. They should have an exit option, and they should have one that doesn't require them to torture themselves on the way out.
Civilization is one big nebulous agreement we have that helps us get along. But I think saying "you can't leave this agreement without being tortured", is just evil.
Forbidding gun ownership means forbidding exit, and it means you lack trust in others to such a degree that it breaks down many of the assumptions we already have about the rights and responsibilities of adults in society.
Some of the implications of my argument that I am already aware of and fine with:
Some areas that I left unaddressed to save space:
I think you are neglecting what to me seems to be the main argument against legal gun ownership, which is that the telos of a gun (especially ones that are not traditional hunting guns, which are legal in many more places anyhow) is to kill people. The common European value system says that basically to a first approximation there should not be a legal way to kill people (and to more detailed approximations we can begrudgingly haggle over exceptions like self-defence against someone who tries to kill you first), and given such a principle it doesn't seem hard to argue for the prohibition of a tool whose principal purpose is just that.
I don't see this value as introducing any obvious slippery slope in itself, and moreover your line of interpretation ("strip every single joy out of life") that aims to connect it to one can only work by way of trading a sacred value (no killing) off for a profane one (fun). The profane-sacred boundary in general is pretty good at stopping slope-slipping, and the argument that the weaker form of this slippery slope ("strip every single joy that grates against a sacred value out of life") is still all that bad has not been made.
This is an argument that you will have to contend with if you want to persuade people of this value system (which I gather is no longer solely a European thing, but has spread deep into urban globalised parts of the US). Of course, from over in Germany, there is also a lower-hanging question to ask: are you for speed limits on your highways?
The principle purpose (as measured by actual use) of all civilian firearms, no matter how outlandish, is sporting.
I of course find the idea that there shouldn't be a legal way to kill people wrong, and it's against the ethos and traditions of my country's heritage (and indeed most of Europe's, arguably) but to say the primary purpose of e.g. an AR-15 is to kill people is a lot like saying that the primary purpose of alcoholic drinks is to get cirrhosis of the liver.
What makes it superior for sporting over either something like a hunting rifle, or something like a fairground gun that shoots tiny bullets of a few millimetres calibre? It's hard to believe that the knowledge that you are "sporting" with a weapon that would be a prime choice for actually killing people, and preparing/building skills for a hypothetical situation in which you would want to kill someone, is not an important factor in the choice; the circumstance that actual use of civilian firearms appears pretty strongly correlated with the belief that there should be a legal way to kill people further supports this interpretation.
If the development of alcoholic drinks were driven by people trying to find better ways to get cirrhosis of the liver, there still were large and massively funded organisations deliberately binge-drinking to the point of getting it and gatherings of alcoholic drink enjoyers regularly involved enthusiastic arguments which cocktail gets you more scar tissue faster, and the most popular fictional depictions of alcoholic drinks all involved flashy celebrations of how they induce cirrhosis, then maybe this comparison would work.
As it stands, the argument comes across as being more in the class of arguing that CP (AI-generated, to dispel the most obvious counterargument) should be legal and easily available, and its principal purpose is artistic edification (chosen for being a similarly nebulous term as "sporting", distinguished from its lower-status counterpart "sexual gratification"/"fantasizing about killing", resp., only by the speaker's attitude towards the act), but incidentally you also find the idea that there shouldn't be a legal way to have sex with minors wrong. (That's approximately an actual constellation of ideas some pre-1990 libertines over here in Europe had!)
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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