Guns make shooters shoot people.

[duece71]

This right here is a little bit of brilliance. I'm stealing this line and repeating it frequently. To gun banners.

Me too, good stuff.

[Belmont31R]

Ive always brought up the long gun deaths stat with people and how many other categories of deaths rank above it. Long guns include shotguns, bolt actions, semi-auto, etc. Even then a baseball bat or pool or a knife in the kitchen are WAY more likely to be involved in a death than a long gun yet there's ZERO background checks or calls to ban sporting equipment, pools, and kitchen utensils.

One of the reasons why long gun or 'rifle deaths' never get brought up ALONG WITH the stats is due to the lack of actual murders attributed to long guns. Open public mass shootings are tragic and there's often a long trail of warnings leading up to them but overall long gun murders are pretty rare compared to everything else. Even explain to people the NFA and how you actually can buy machine guns, sawed off shotguns, suppressors, etc, and they basically are non-existent on any crime stats. If a person is reasonable and can understand basic math they'll accept just blanket banning shit doesn't work and the lack of blanket bans isn't why mass murders are happening.

European terrorism is actually a good example, too. These bans already exist over there along with the surveillance laws, and they cannot stop mass murders. Banning guns doesn't do shit when you can go rent a box truck for $100 and find events every weekend in big cities where people will be funneled and backed up into lines. In fact that's probably more effective than using guns.