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Comment by karaterobot | Hacker News Reader

The proliferation of 3D printed firearms completely changed my opinion on gun control a few years ago. I used to think that getting rid of guns was a great first step. But, it seems like it's not really feasible to do that. Now my opinion is that maybe it should be the last step, after addressing the causes of gun death (suicide and the drug war are at the top of the list). But at that point, if we'd actually fixed those problems, I wonder if there would be much of a pressing need to get rid of guns at all.

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Even if you solved that, you'd still have problems with knives (you can't outlaw kitchen knives), homemade explosives, sticks, screwdrivers, acid, etc.

Mental health, crime, and drugs (also, again crime related to those), and you've solved most of the problems. Just legalizing some drugs would probably solve more than half of the issues in some places.

Watching Americans try to justify gun culture and why it isn't the real problem is always baffling to me. I do wonder if you're expressing genuinely held beliefs or if your head is wilfully in the sand.

The irony of your "head is willfully in the sand" remark in the context of an ever-widening hole in the effectiveness of gun control is thick enough to spread on toast.

"Gun culture" (whatever that actually means) is not the problem. The fact that the US is the least-developed of the "developed" world is the problem. The fact American income disparity and mental health are both deteriorating at a rapid pace is the problem. People kill each other (or, more commonly, themselves) here in the US - with or without guns - because they're broke, stressed the fuck out, and so desperate for any semblance of relief that they're driven to either put themselves out of the misery our capitalist system has thrust upon them or else lash out at the rest of the very society disenfranchising them.

Lol watching non-Americans and their Stockholm syndrome about their governments taking their rights away is always amusing to me.

If you don't have a gun you're not a citizen, you're a subject.

Fitting right in with Nicaragua and Zimbabwe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...

Have you looked into the statistics of how many people succeed in suicide, world-wide, from knives, homemade explosives, sticks, screwdrivers, vs. how many succeed in suicide from firearms?

I mean, have you?

If you haven't, then why would you bring them up as "problems"?

Or are you just spit-balling?

Disclaimer: I'm not from the US.

I don't understand this importance of that metric. The US has a high suicide rate but there are EU contries with a much lower guns per capita that have similar suicide rate.

Sweden has a rate of 12.4 vs 14.5 suicides in the US per 100k people [1], yet the guns-per-100-persons in Sweden is 23.1 vs 120.5 in the US [2].

An undeducated glance of the numbers shows that people tend to hang themselves when guns are not readily available like in the US [3].

How much do you think suicide will drop in the US if you removed all weapons overnight?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g... [3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2649482/

You haven't answered my question. What is the suicide rate from knives? You specifically brought up knives as a "problem." Your word.

What is the suicide rate from homemade explosives?

Sticks?

Screwdrivers?

You brought those up as "problems."

The evidence I have seen makes me believe that suicide in otherwise healthy individuals seems to be a fleeting goal. It's not as though someone becomes set upon their decision, and continues attempting it until they succeed, for the vast majority of people.

Thus, when someone has the temporary motive of suicide, and they have a firearm available, they tend to succeed. When they have a temporary motive of suicide, but they don't have a firearm available, they succeed less often.

I get that the burden would be on me to argue that perspective with evidence, and I'm not going to be able to provide it any time soon, and I apologize for that.

But since you brought up the "problems" of knives, homemade explosives, sticks, and screwdrivers, again, I have to ask - do you have any evidence that those are worth being described as "problems"?

I failed to mention that I was not the original commenter.

> Thus, when someone has the temporary motive of suicide, and they have a firearm available, they tend to succeed. When they have a temporary motive of suicide, but they don't have a firearm available, they succeed less often.

To my, I repeat, uneducated eyes, the statistics I posted seem to show that people simply hang themselves when they don't have guns, but I cannot say with any kind of guarantee that this is correct. I don't like drawing such strong conclusions because I know it's not that simple to read statistics. If you can support your claims with data I'd love to read it.

Came across this:

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/means-matter/case-...

That to me shows that 82.5% of those who attempt suicide by firearms succeed, whereas the next causes are drowning 65%, hanging 61%, gas 41%, jumping 34%, then all the way down to drugs 1.5%, cutting 1.2%.

Canadian goverment doesn't care about suicide in fact they encourage it :D or is it only okay when is goverment assisted ?

It's much harder to kill people with a knife than with a gun.

In the US, mass shooters have killed a dozen or more victims in a minute or two. Very hard to achieve with anything else short of explosives.

Good thing no one ever uses IEDs then…..

As I said, short of "explosives" which IEDs need. And yes, IEDs are rarer than gun shootings pretty much everywhere, because explosives are a lot better restricted, even in the otherwise completely insane US. I guess some control works??

There are explosives, as in actual regulated explosives, and then there are IEDs, which can use anything from repurposed old artillery shells, to stolen construction explosives, to mixed kitchen chemicals and fertilizer.

IEDs are not rarer than shootings because of controls, most likely. A Timothy McVeigh style attack is still very doable with off the shelf stuff.

Explosives were never okay in Iraq either, post-Saddam (or guns, for that matter). It didn’t stop IEDs being the #1 threat. Same with Ireland during ‘the troubles’. Guns are direct in application, limited in impact, and expose the wielder to direct harm. Explosives, don’t.

Explosives do require a degree of planning that a gun doesn’t though. And tend to be clearly ‘terrorist’/‘terrible’ in nature.

The crazy just hasn’t been bottled up enough for it to get there in the US. Yet, anyway.

Look up vehicle ramming attacks. Easy to commit, hard to prevent, very effective from the mass murderer's perspective. For example, in 2016, an attack with a truck killed 86 people and wounded 458 in Nice. You can't stop people from mass murder if they have their mind set on it.

The best prevention would be figure out why they want to kill and solve the underlying issue, but that's too hard I guess. Strategies like "ban X" are an admission that we're not interested in root causes. Instead we pretend that removing the instruments or making the penalties worse will work. Predictably, all that will happen is people who want to commit mass murder will find other ways to do it.

Not true. Such ramming attacks are actually quite rare. And even when they do occur, they usually cause far fewer accidents. It takes quite a bit of planning or even luck to pull off a significant victim count. In "practical terms" a lot can go "wrong", like people running or jumping away or obstacles stopping the vehicle. And even if not, the victims are rather random, which is often not what amok runners want.

Restricting access to guns has worked remarkably well pretty much everywhere. Turns out, the easier you make it to kill people, the more people get killed. And it's not like firearms have remotely as much legitimate use for average people like cars.

False.

One guy in Nice, France killed 86 and injured over 400 in a single attack. That's more deaths than every school shooting in the US since at least 2000, and 10x more injuries.

France also saw 128 dead in one night in nightclub shootings, so all their gun laws didn't do jack.

It is simply false that outlawing guns has reduced these deaths.

> It's much harder to kill people with a knife than with a gun.

This seems like a reasonable statement, but I don't think it's true.

If I had to be shot with a handgun from close range or stabbed with a kitchen knife, I would absolutely choose being shot. You're statistically far more likely to survive a shooting than an attack with a bladed weapon.

Were did you pull that "statistic" out of?

There haven't been 641 "mass stabbings" in 2022 in the US. Plenty of people also get killed by shotgun. Still, shotguns probably aren't the worst offenders and that sounds like a total red herring when school children get dismembered by assault style rifles somewhat regularly.

> In the US, mass shooters have killed a dozen or more victims in a minute or two. Very hard to achieve with anything else short of explosives.

That is absolutely not true.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Nice_truck_attack

86 dead, 458 injured.

Yes, you can jump straight to the one incident that caused more victims than an average mass shooting. Do you know any others? Why is that incident already 6 years ago? They seem to be few and far between... globally.

Because causing a high victim count with a vehicle attack is not impossible but hard. Which was my point, had you bothered to read my comment properly.

> Yes, you can jump straight to the one incident that caused more victims than an average mass shooting. Do you know any others?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Land_fire (gasoline)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks (box cutters and airplanes)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide (some firearms, but mostly machetes).

There are plenty more, including a bunch of genocides that took place before firearms were even invented.

> Because causing a high victim count with a vehicle attack is not impossible but hard.

Sorry, that's simply not true. All you need is a large vehicle and a crowd.

You are making my point: You are cherry picking incidents while ignoring the vast number of mass shootings. All I'm saying is it is easier to kill a lot of people with a proper gun. All the "counter examples" you give are everything but "easy". They take planning and a lot of effort. Mass shooters sometimes buy their gun on the day of the attack. Then all it takes is pulling a trigger.

And no, "all you need is a vehicle and a crowd" isn't true. In reality, most of these incidents end up with very few victims if at all. Turns out, a lot can go wrong with that "plan". There can be a lot of obstacles between a car and a crowd that make charging into it harder. Any bump and the car looses speed. Cars get stuck. Bigger vehicles aren't as easy to get a hold of or drive. So no, it's not as easy as with a gun, and that's why in actual reality, in the US amok runners choose firearms over vehicle pretty much every time, and everywhere else man slaughter by car isn't exactly an epidemic either.

> All the "counter examples" you give are everything but "easy".

Nonsense.

There's nothing hard about renting a truck and driving it into a crowd.

> Bigger vehicles aren't as easy to get a hold of or drive.

Nonsense.

https://www.uhaul.com/

https://www.pensketruckrental.com/

Also, the Happy Land perpetrator literally walked down to the corner gas station and bought a gas can and a gallon of gas. No waiting. No ID. No background check.

Yet, somehow all of these methods get used orders of magnitude less than firearms to commit mass murders. Both in the US and elsewhere.

The US isn't really my standard. In sane jurisdictions you actually need a special license for bigger vehicles. And those still aren't as easy to control as smaller cars, so I suspect you highly underestimate the difficulty involved in committing mass murder with a vehicle. Sure it's not impossible, but pulling a trigger is one heck of a lot easier.

People who try to commit amok runs with cars or trucks actually do get stuck quite often.

You keep shifting the goalposts -- your original post specifically mentioned the US.

The issue here is that you think the problem is "this guy has a gun" rather than "this guy wants to kill a bunch of people". It's like trying to combat alcoholism by banning shot glasses.

I think we're done.

Or poison. Or vehicles. Or hacking safety devices (e.g. traffic lights). Or on and on.

Not true. All those means of murder are way harder to pull off and are rarer. Also in most countries, even with gun control, so far as I can tell.

> Mental health, crime, and drugs (also, again crime related to those), and you've solved most of the problems.

¿Por qué no los dos?

At the very least having a filter so that not just any rando can walk around packing heat would probably be helpful:

* https://www.autoblog.com/2022/01/31/florida-man-road-rage-sh...

If you want it at home for whatever reason, have fun. Though some safe storage laws may be a good idea (and strong liability):

* https://www.cbsnews.com/news/first-grader-allegedly-shot-tea...

Canada has already the filters for legal gun owners; we are not the states the amount of hoops that legal gun owners have to go through.

Anyone that owns a restricted firearm; like handguns or rifles under certain length is added to a database and their name is daily checked for felonies, domestic abuse, etc.

In order to get a permit, you have to get sign of your spouse or if you are under 2 years divorced from the previous partner.

Mandatory training and course certification is part of it. We don't have open carry here.

Restricted can only be used on ranges. We have transport permits; etc etc etc

80% or more or guns used in violent crime are illegal and coming from the US border. Why? Harder to trace, don't any of the magazine or automatic restrictions that there are in Canada.

>Even if you solved that, you'd still have problems with knives (you can't outlaw kitchen knives),

There are many pictures with labels in the uk saying you have to be over 18 to buy plastic utensils, because there's a knife.

This is why the UK had more homicides after banning firearms.

Homicides up, gun related homicides down. Turns out, you have some gangster shoot up a place. They land perhaps a couple shots and run off. The victim is rushed to hospital where they are saved.

Chef knife victim on the otherhand will die.

So the politicians who banned guns in the UK are morally responsible for more deaths occurring. They could have addressed the actual reason the homicides were occurring but failed to do so.

If 3D printed firearms made gun production so accessible, then why aren't we seeing a proliferation of gun usage in countries where gun controls and purchase requirements are much more strict than the USA? Is it just because those are stronger societies so people are more apt to follow the law even if it technically easy to break those laws?

Backyard gun production has been something done in China for a couple of decades now, but you still see very little gun usage in that country where it is otherwise banned (backyard gun production is also a death penalty crime, so there are strong disincentives).

Other than the occasional mass genocide hardly anyone dies from guns in China!

On the plus side, most modern day peace-time gun deaths being caused by suicide, the state will just execute you to save the danger of you having a gun to commit suicide with!

We are seeing a proliferation of craft built firearms (some 3D printed) in Myanmar. Gun controls and purchase requirements are very strict there, but it's somewhat of a failed state with ongoing insurgencies. You can find plenty of videos of those weapons online; quality looks close to low-end factory products.

I predict we'll see the same thing happen in China in about a decade when Xi Jinping dies and the central government starts to lose control over the southern regions. There was a already a lot of local workshop firearms manufacturing in China during the Warlord Era before the Communist Party consolidated control over the mainland so history may repeat itself.

Unfortunately, Mental illness is largely not the cause of gun violence like the media says it is, the issue is that there are so many guns out there that are so easy to get a hand on by anyone, that gun violence is so bad. And since JFK got rid of sanatoriums and expected the private companies to pick up the slack, 60 years ago, there will never be enough care as proven by the lack of care today. Sorry, we don't, nor will we ever, prioritize it enough to have any meaningful impact on gun violence. You take the weapons out of reach of people who would use them to do harm to others _first_, and only then can we make any progress on the issues. But too many companies and unscrupulous people are out there and they actively block and write legislation to make gun violence a certainty. Bad advertising and death is still good advertising to these people. As for 3D printed guns, we have a whole ATF bureau that should be on this just like they are on the illegal fully auto gun mods.

Unconstitutional.

We keep a gun behind every blade of grass for a reason.

3d printed guns are as difficult to control as media piracy, which is to say, it's impossible.

Not true. A 3d printed gun won't do you any good unless you at least test it and probably not until you carry it around outside your home. Plenty of chances to get caught with an illegal firearm.

Between firearms being easier to detect than pirated media and police being a lot more motivated to go after them, 3D printed guns are quite controllable...

How’s the war on drugs working out?

Completely irrelevant response. Restricting access to guns has worked remarkably well to reduce loss of life virtually everywhere it has been tried and enacted somewhat competently.

Europe doesn't regularly see school children getting dismembered by assault-style rifles. Neither does Australia, and they tightened up their gun regulation relatively recently after they figured out they had a problem.

Try to legally get a handgun or semi-automatic rifle in the u.s. walk me through that process. You may be surprised to find that it's much harder than you claim it to be.

My neighbor has been waiting since Dec 20th for his background check to complete, so he can get his new shotgun (not a handgun, not even a semi-automatic). Given how far back he is in line, and how much it moves in a day, he is looking at mid-february to get his shotgun. Our state is intentionally slow-walking all background checks while they try to win some court cases centered around some recent gun control ballot measures.

He has a concealed carry license, which means he already completed a very detailed background check within the last 2 years in our state, and usually, approval takes something like 10 min for concealed license holders since the already have your info.

Note that the federal law says if a background check takes more than 3 days, the dealer MAY give you the weapon, but most retail chains will not honor that, since they are worried about liability. That wording was put in to make sure that states and the FBI would not try to slow-walk things, under-hire, etc.

Having to wait two months doesn't seem particularly hard to me.

OP is likely from Oregon and it sounds like it could be very hard, as the delay may be imposed in association with needing further licensing after he misses the cutoff. It is my understanding there may not even be a way to get the license yet after he misses the cutoff.

AFAIK the new ballot approved scheme requires this currently unobtonium new permit even for those with a CCW, and this delay may push him into unobtanium being in force.

My friends ex husband works at OSP’s firearms bg department. They’re being told (not in writing) to GO VERY SLOWLY. Like 1-2 per day, vs the 400 that is possible.

Would you feel the same way if you were a petite 20-year-old woman who was just threatened by your husband after filing for divorce and being granted a temporary restraining order against him?

I am not sure if buying a gun is the adequate answer to this threat. However I am not a US citizen and I get the point. Sometimes, I guess, it's a good thing to delay the checks to let the people chill a bit until they get their gun. Also letting the 20-year-old woman buy a gun with no proper training might likely result in two casualties.

Yes: someone in that situation is far more likely to be the victim of gun violence (the attacker can pick the time and place, everyone has to sleep, etc.). Having that violent ex unable to get a gun because the review process determined they were a high risk would save many lives in the U.S. every year.

Oregon represent!

Why the hell would you need a shotgun?

Like, I am normally very anti-gun, but I do accept the premise that the cat is out of the bag in case of the US. But why not stick to small pistols for self-defense? Ok, let’s have some shooting range that has shotguns and whatnot in an ultra-secure manner for “fun”, but otherwise why would you need anything else at home?

Huh? I have a sporting goods store in my neighborhood that I've bought a few from. You walk in, say I want it, fill out the form and pay your money. The checks add a few minutes, but it's not much different from buying a barbecue which they sell a few aisles down.

Yes, this is how it is for me also. State laws vary greatly.

Interestingly in my state, scientific glassware was more restricted for a few years than guns were. I believe this law has been deprecated, probably in no small part due to irony.

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/threads/texas-brewers-erlenmeye...

> Unfortunately, Mental illness is largely not the cause of gun violence like the media says it is, the issue is that there are so many guns out there that are so easy to get a hand on by anyone, that gun violence is so bad.

This is close to the position I used to take. I now believe it's incorrect, mostly because (I am speaking of the United States in particular) you aren't going to get people to give up their guns. It's just not going to happen on a foreseeable timeline. Add in the existence of 3D printed firearms, and it becomes a laughable prospect. If you accept that as a premise, what do you do next if you want to reduce gun deaths? Probably what you should have done in the first place, which is to attack the cause rather than the method of death.

> you aren't going to get people to give up their guns

This is often overlooked in discussions around gun control on this board.

There are at a bare minimum tens of millions of gun owners in the US. A lot of them will simply not allow them to be taken, and will use whatever level of response is necessary to prevent that from happening.

I count myself among that group. I would rather die preserving the right to privately-owned weapons than willingly live in an environment where that right is not recognized. To be clear - that is not a figurative statement for me. I'm an extremely peaceful person who is deeply empathetic and do my best to help the people around me. I see violence as a last resort, but an option that is justified when there is no other alternative. In my experience, this is an extremely common perspective in "US gun culture".

If your motivation is to reduce violence and preserve human life, I am extremely confident that attempting widespread confiscation of firearms in the US would not be an effective strategy.

> You take the weapons out of reach of people who would use them to do harm to others _first_, and only then can we make any progress on the issues.

Translation: "we'll disarm who we please and demand that you wait until we're satisfied before we start tackling the actual issues driving violence and suicide"

Nah, that ain't how this works. We as a society can and should be addressing the systemic causes of violent crime and suicide now; punting on that on the basis of "but bad people still have guns" is reprehensible.

This is about Canada; I know is shocking but is a different country than the US. The gun regulations and laws and culture is very different from the good ol' USA.

> Now my opinion is that maybe it should be the last step, after addressing the causes of gun death (suicide and the drug war are at the top of the list).

That, unlike gun regulation, would actually save lives. Keep in mind The US has a much lower suicide rate than South Korea, despite South Korea having extremely strict gun control, for instance.

In countries where guns are unavailable, people simply resort to other means. But their casualties aren't aggregated under the "firearm death" column.

To me, gun control is about political gains. Not saving lives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Nice_truck_attack

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shafia_family_murders

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London,_Ontario_truck_attack

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Calgary_stabbing

https://nypost.com/2020/11/03/quebec-police-release-new-deta...

https://www.the-sun.com/news/2445508/toronto-van-attack-ince...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_London_Bridge_attack

Prohibition = Black Market without elimination. Trudeau got rid of cannabis prohibition because the black market simply ran through the Canada Post.

Gun control has an end goal of "If we banned guns worldwide, the supply would eventually dry up." But this is entirely unrealistic.

Regardless of gun control this will never change anything like the number of homicides. All the recent shootings in Toronto were from guns which were never legal in Canada.

Even in the USA with right to bear arms. It's really 50,000 suicides out of 300,000,000 population consisting of the vast majority of gun crime. Trying to help prevent suicides by gun control is ridiculously bad policy to ignore suicides.

> Now my opinion is that maybe it should be the last step, after addressing the causes of gun death (suicide and the drug war are at the top of the list). But at that point, if we'd actually fixed those problems, I wonder if there would be much of a pressing need to get rid of guns at all.

I've given myself plenty a sore throat stating and restating this exact point over the years. Even waving a magic wand that magically erases the very concept of a firearm from existence would do precisely nothing to address the underlying causes of violence and suicide - and actually addressing said underlying causes would be far more effective in reducing (if not outright eliminating) said violence and suicide (not to mention the myriad other societal benefits!) than said gun-erasing magic wand (let alone any less-stringent form of gun control).

Unfortunately, said underlying causes - in particular, socioeconomic inequality and mental healthcare inaccessibility - are notoriously difficult to address without pissing off the people largely in control of the world's governments/economies/societies. Said people also happen to not like it when their serfs have the means to fight back against that control - and therefore have a vested interest in convincing us serfs to demand our own disarmament instead of demanding they pay their fair share toward actual solutions.

(In case anyone thinks I'm being too coy: yes, I'm referring to the ownership class - i.e. the beneficiaries of capitalism, i.e. the ones who subsist primarily/entirely on the profits skimmed from the rest of our labor. You don't have to be a full-blown Marxist or whatever to understand the age-old adages of "money is power" and "power corrupts".)

Is gangs shooting each other, (usually family) homicides and school shootings not big enough problems? Because we have plenty of countries with similar social problems, yet they have much much lower deaths per capita, so it is safe to conclude that guns are a problem. (Nonetheless, I won’t pretend to know a solution, the car is out of the bag and the US is not easily fixable. But stricter gun control is definitely a good way ahead)

> Is gangs shooting each other, (usually family) homicides and school shootings not big enough problems?

They are symptoms. People don't join gangs or shoot up schools for the hell of it. They do those things because either their material conditions drove them to that point or they failed to receive the mental help they needed before it was too late (respectively).

> Because we have plenty of countries with similar social problems, yet they have much much lower deaths per capita

The ones with lower deaths per capita also typically have lower degrees/magnitudes of said social problems. The correlation is with socioeconomic stability and equality, not with any particular tool.

That is:

> it is safe to conclude that guns are a problem

No, that ain't a safe conclusion, and does not logically follow. If that was a safe conclusion, then countries like South Africa - with far stricter gun laws and far fewer guns per person - would have lower homicide rates, and that is rather evidently not the case.

Socioeconomic problems correlate with gun crimes, but it is absolutely naive to think that we can achieve perfect mental health/material conditions. Even if we managed to get UBI for everyone and in a strictly theoretical sense solved these issues and everyone is well off, doesn’t have to work etc, we would still have mental health issues, psychopaths, etc (as even the best medical care will fail plenty of times). I see no evil in limiting their reach of destruction, plus healing symptoms is just as important even in actual medicine as they can just as well kill you. Of course it is not exclusive-or, we have to do plenty to better the mental health of basically every country’s population.

It's totally possible to control 3D-printed guns. Perfectly? Maybe not. But it helps if guns are illegal, so police can stop people who go around carrying them.

The way of manufacturing the gun really doesn't matter. Tons of "legal" guns get stolen, misplaced or sold illegally. Gun control is much more about restricting access as much as possible and making it hard for people to have an opportunity to use a gun. If you can just carry one around casually in your every day life, there are just too many opportunities for something to go badly.

Absolutely. The people buying illicit weapons need the means and motivation to do it, both of which stem from the black market for drugs.

Tried to illegalize alcohol - failed. Tried to illegalize drugs - failed Trying to illegalize guns - failing.

Today's progressives are tomorrow's conservatives. Yesterday's progressives wanted drugs to never be spoken of or taught. Today's progressives never want guns to be spoken of or taught. Everyone thinks they're special and more moral, but they're just the same human condition.

Gun control works quite well in all civilized countries. With remarkably better results than in the US...

Gun control even worked in the US until some people redefined the 2nd amendment and drank the NRA koolaid.

It did? So gun violence was lower in the 1990s/2000s than it was after the Heller decision?

In so far as it was tried. The assault rifle ban had some positive impact, its revocation certainly made school shootings more deadly.

There is a long history of gun control in the US actually. The 2nd amendment originally was only meant for well regulated militias to carry simple rifles. Not for disgruntled white males to dismember school children.

> The 2nd amendment originally was only meant for well regulated militias to carry simple rifles

That is your opinion, and it is very wrong.

It's the literal text of the amendment. And the opinion of most historic and legal scholars.

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