Originally Posted by
Endus
I don't agree that there's clean and easy "sides" in the first place. But if one faction is saying "we're already doing everything we can in terms of gun control", then they are implicitly arguing that they prefer more dead kids to taking further steps. There is an issue; kids are being killed in spree shootings at schools, over and above the strong outlier in terms of gun homicide rates as compared to other developed nations. We all agree this is an issue. So you either support doing something about it, in terms of enacting new policy to address it, or you do not support doing something about it, in which case "dead kids" is a price you are implicitly willing to pay, rather than the costs of taking action.
None of this is happening in a vacuum. The USA is not the only country there is. There are plenty of other developed nations, and basically none of them have this issue. So the issue is the differences between the two countries. And the stand-out factors are the USA's comparative lack of gun control and high levels of gun ownership. Either you accept that something has to be changed, or you want things to stay as they are, and "dead kids" is a price you're willing to pay to keep things that way. Do the anti-gun-control types find that objectionable? I'm sure they do. But it is not unfair. It's an accurate portrayal of what their stance implicitly states. Stamping your feet and saying "hey, we weren't explicit about it!" isn't a defense.
And it's not that they WANT dead kids. But they prefer more school shootings to taking effective steps to prevent them via gun control.
If you're saying "it's a mental health issue, not a gun control issue", then you're wrong, because part of handling mental health issues is keeping guns out of the hands of potentially dangerous individuals. Mental health is a factor, but addressing it necessarily involves gun control.
If you're saying "guns don't kill people, people kill people", you're a useless pedantic. And gun control is about controlling how people can access and acquire guns, so it isn't even a relevant bit of pedantry.
This stuff shouldn't be that difficult to understand.