So that only the cops and criminals have guns. Good idea.

It works well in all the civilised countries in the world. And it’s a bad faith, morally illiterate argument.

Bad faith and moral illiteracy not withstanding, I don't want to live in a county where only the police and the criminals are armed.

Look at the statistics on gun deaths for other anglosphere countries, then look at the numbers especially for Canada where gun ownership is similar to the US but they don’t kill each other. I’m not making a facile point: there is a real psychosocial problem with the US population.

I agree with everything you just wrote.

OK sorry if I sounded hostile but I have lived in the US and I have tried to reason with the gun lobby. Completely futile.

No hostility taken. I think there is no easy solution to the US gun violence problem. If you ban guns and somehow manage to confiscate all the registered firearms, that'll leave a few hundred million out there in the hands of the non-law-abiding.

Yes. The logistics are hard to compute. I wish that somehow people could be shown that the fetishisation of guns is completely abnormal and unnecessary. But…