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This weekend, I visited my friendly local gun store, idly browsing for shotguns and learning about interstate purchases. Then I drove to my parents and spent the evening playing board games. It was a nice night with good food, drink and company.
Meanwhile, five minutes up the highway, some lunatic was murdering random strangers at a local shopping mall.
No one I know was killed. No one I know personally was present—though a friend of a friend was. I didn’t hear about it until the next morning. Big nothingburger, right? And yet I’ve been to that mall. I’ve been to the bar across the street with my coworkers. If I’d had an errand or three to run, instead of visiting my family, I might have been cowering in a storeroom or staring at a splatter of brains on the sidewalk.
I’m not linking to any articles. Partly for the thinnest veneer of opsec, partly because media coverage is predictably terrible. All sympathetic pictures and, as we’d say here, recruiting for a cause. Nothing good will come of this. Either we’ll force through a knee-jerk bill with symbolic limits on firearms, or we’ll (correctly) dismiss that as posturing and (incorrectly) do abso-fucking-lutely nothing.
It’s not like I can do anything about it. I don’t know what I would actually expect to work, and if I did, how could it be brought about? State, even local politics is as tribal as it gets. Enjoy your a la carte selection of two options, and one of them is out of stock.
Meanwhile, I guess the best I can do is pick up some CCW training and a good holster. Fuck.
Because the way politics works in the US, all the nuances and caveats you listed (and which are a key part of your overall point) would go completely unheard by people. We live in the country of the soundbite (not that we are necessarily unique in this, of course). The instant gun rights advocates said "I admit that if all guns were confiscated, murder rates would go down", every single gun control proponent would be writing editorials that said "even gun rights advocates admit gun control works". They would run campaign ads that go "Senator so-and-so admits gun control works (insert sound clip here). Yet he voted down these measures every time, blah blah he is the devil vote for me instead." In short, it would be a complete disaster for gun rights and for the careers of those who advance them. The latter outcome is probably the bigger of the two, of course, since politicians are pretty much the most self-serving creatures in existence. But even people honestly considering the cause of gun rights would have some concern about the former outcome.
It's kind of like when Scott Alexander writes an essay about some controversial topic or other. Every single time, he includes a million lines trying to say "yes, if you take this one sentence out of context it sounds bad but that's not what I'm saying and you fail at reading comprehension if you think that". Every single time, there's at least one person who is unscrupulous enough to take that sentence out of context and use it to demonize him. And every single time, Scott is caught off-guard because he made the mistake of believing he was dealing with people who are acting in good faith. Or at least until he stopped writing about controversial topics (which is probably the right call for him).
So yeah, that's why gun rights advocates don't do what you're suggesting. I'm not saying that's praiseworthy of them, or even that it's merely acceptable in a "I don't like it but I understand" kind of way. Just that's why. The gun rights people are playing politics, and politics is full of flat-out evil people who will twist your words into a weapon against you the instant they can. So they prioritize not giving those people ammunition.
I guess short-term it's the right strategy, but it makes pro-gun people sound like lunatics when they deny that getting rid of the guns would reduce murder. It's not quite as bad as the people who insist that those racial crime statistics don't mean what you think they mean, but it's the same kind of politically-convenient reality denial. If you don't have an affirmative case for why gun rights are more valuable than X dead kids per year, I hate to tell you, but you're going to lose.
The proposition here was that getting rid of the guns would reduce gun murder, not murder in general.
If it's framed that way, gun rights have already lost.
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