Respectfully, what right do you have to determine my needs?

From a more practical perspective, what are you going to do about it? Are you proposing to take arms from the American people by force? How many deaths are acceptable to make that happen?

To be clear, I don't mean the above as a threat or anything of the sort. I'm merely pointing out the certain result of a policy of disarmament, and the hypocrisy of using force to render a population defenseless.

Not to mention that self defense is a natural negative right. Gun ownership falls in the same category. My negative right to defend myself with a gun, from someone wishing to do me egregious or fatal harm doesn't affect anyone else.

There are negative rights and positive rights. We all could learn a little more about them. See 2.1.8 @ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rights/#2.1

> Are you proposing to take arms from the American people by force

To the extent that libertarians believe that taxes are extracted by force (I usually see this written as "violence") then yes. If each gun carried a tax sufficient to mitigate it's societal cost, and if each cartridge were an order of magnitude more expensive, we would be done with this issue in 100 years.

It will take a long time, but it won't get done if we don't start.

(Preventively - yes, you can 3D print yourself a handgun, and likely blow your hand off, and reload your own bullets. At that point your personal time doing that work is a proxy for the taxes you would have payed.)

It would never be an overnight event, it would take a generation of ratcheting restrictions. In that sense the "slippery slope" pro-gun people are right; the end point of incremental measures has to be a country with far fewer guns.

But it looks just as feasible from an ideological point of view as ending white supremacism in the US.

Ugh, the "ratcheting restrictions" tactic is why we can't have ANY compromise on gun laws. The NRA is not stupid.

> Nobody needs a gun. If you think you need a gun then you have serious problems.

Tell that to the president and secret service.

EDIT: The purpose of the comment above is to point out the prescription above isn't a black and white issue. At least not if you are thinking about the real world we live in.

You also never need to defend yourself in this hypotetical situation.

Imagine the absurdity of US citizens being told this by their government, who then drafts their 18 year old children and sends them to a foreign land to kill people with the most lethal technology the US military industrial complex can come up with. Paid for by US citizens tax dollars.

And the government "needs" to take them, why? And the police "need" bigger ones, why? And the government "needs" attack drones, why? I don't think my post is unreasonable - I'm calling for demilitarization all over the place - not just the ones unlucky enough to not get a secret service detail or government issued weapon for life.

What about a musket, one chosen purposefully for inefficient reloading speed. Is that more appealing for home protection because we'd be prevented from committing a mass shooting?

"nobody needs a gun"

This is a statement that for anyone to take seriously requires you to say your age and approx geographic location as it clearly is informing your belief.

Sometimes serious problems are external.

For example, 1911 Turkey, 1929 Soviet Russia, 1938 Germany, 1964 Guatemala, and 1970 Uganda.

I'm sure plenty of citizens would have preferred to have had a gun in the years shortly after the bans.

1970s Northern Ireland?