“I didn’t mean for this to happen.”

Intentions are irrelevant, despite what the law in one or more countries says.

Outcome and results are what matter.

Guns.

As I wrote,

Oh, I am frustrated, because a lot of this discussion is pure deflection, nothing more.

Facts are, there are technologies available, which are difficult to defeat, and detectable if defeated, which can guarantee that the only user of a gun is the authorized owner of a gun. While I am not a gun owner, nor would I be, I understand that people want guns for hunting, whether game or humans (“in self defense”). Still, public safety and public health seem adequate justifications for imposing technological controls, backed up by legal measures for incriminating those who try to defeat those controls.

Guns should be available to those who want them, for legal purposes, but the rest of us should have the right to know who they are, and the authorities we assign with responsibility should have the right to intervene when public safety is threatened.

And the rest of the “self defense against tyranny” is nonsense, not supported by the Constitution, although one could cobble together some legal theory along those lines from circumstantial historical evidence, I admit.

Americans are not exceptional, no matter what they think. To the degree they do, quality of living here is worse than in the rest of the world, despite the audacious earnings per capita we so champion. Try to attract the Best And The Brightest in the world with that!

This is a completely artificially hepped and hyped and parochial issue, disconnected from reality. It is the worst shame the United States is capable of indulging, making everything in its history hypocrisy and a laughingstock. Securing the world against Nazism but allowing random empowered-with-guns nutcases to assault schools and churches, leaving surviving innocents with psychological trauma? What in the world are you defending if that’s what you want to allow?

I’ve offered my recommendations. Gun violence is a disease. It should be treated like any other disease.

Update, 2018-02-23

Dr Heather Sher remarks at The Atlantic why AR-15 weapons and similar ought not be owned by civilians.