A Moogle  🏳️‍🌈 💻 🎮 🎶 🇸🇪

As an American who's lived happily in Sweden for over four years now - and who plans to renounce his American citizenship once he can get Swedish citizenship - I feel that I have some insight into this issue,

First and foremost, Twitter is a lousy medium for discussing something as nuanced as firearm ownership control (let's call it what it is; "gun control" is shorter, but less accurate). Even with 280 characters, it's just not enough proverbial skin.

Having said that, the primary issue comes down to how ingrained firearm ownership is in the US. People love to point to other countries that successfully banned unlicensed firearm ownership, but those countries didn't literally have firearm ownership as a founding principle.

This causes multiple potential issues when it comes to issuing a blanket ban on firearm ownership. Australia and the UK both successfully had periods for owners to turn in their firearms, but see my previous point - in neither country was ownership so prevalent.

Next, a segment of Americans relentlessly consume media which has convinced them that when Obama was in office, they were literally five minutes away from having jack-booted officers beating their doors down to take their guns. How do we combat that by making their fears reality?

Then there's politicians who know that enacting actual legislation to restrict firearm ownership would be political suicide. So they instead propose, and pass, laws which have literally zero impact on reducing mass shootings, but inconvenience the hell out of legitimate owners.

On top of that, let's be conservative and estimate that there are two firearms for every American (the real number I remember is higher), and we implement a blanket ban on ownership. If 99% of firearms get turned in, that's still 6 *million* black-market firearms floating around.

As much as I don't want to, I find myself siding with the conservatives who say that people who perform mass shootings will just find other ways of hurting people - but for different reasons than the ones they have for saying so.