As the OP said, other countries look on with bemusement at people arguing with a straight face that an anecdote involving one gun owner shooting another gun owner after he'd killed three people with an assault weapon widely and legally available locally proves that a policy of encouraging universal gun ownership is better than alternatives. Not least because some of said countries have four orders of magnitude fewer per capita gun deaths

Sure, we get that changing US gun culture might be a bit more challenging than, say, the UK, where there weren't that many people with handguns to start off with when they were banned, and so it was particularly easy to convince even most criminals carrying wasn't worth the additional penalties. What we find bizarre is that someone buys an assault weapon in the sort of store that's ubiquitous in the US and nonexistent in other countries, walks into a mall with it because local regulations say there's no reason to apprehend somebody entering a mall with assault rifles until they've killed someone, and that event gets chalked up as a win for local gun policy because the casualties were in the single digits this time due to the rare use of a civilian gun against a mass shooter

> Removing guns from law abiding citizens

…who will later be law not abiding when they shoot someone.

People want to prevent violence not punish it more.

I’ve never seen any real claim that people aren’t getting arrested for hurting people, but I’ve seen a lot of people that want to stop the violence before it happens.

That mindset feels reminiscent of the ever-increasing size of vehicles on the road. You avoid the smaller vehicle for fear of being run off the road (or worse) by an oversized truck and so instead of the subcompact you go with the midsize, then crossover, then SUV, ad infinitum.

Also, we’ve already been incarcerating people at an alarming rate.* It seems like there’s something more fundamental being neglected — that’s compelling Americans to use our (abundance of) weapons more readily.

* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarce...

As others have mentioned, we're already one of the leading countries in terms of imprisoning people. You're saying the gun violence problem is therefore because we don't imprison enough people?

What % of the population do you think needs to be imprisoned before we recognize that maybe its guns that are the problem?

Hello, the US is the world leader in imprisoning people. It clearly doesn't work very well.

It's also illegal in the USA per the 2nd. That's one of the few things the current SCOTUS is getting right.