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Why Is This Reality
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Song Lyrics Verse 1
Not even one month
Into the new year
And we have had
How many
Mass shootings
Go ahead idiots
Tell me again
How this is not
A gun problem
Then go ahead
And tell that shit
To the families
Of the victims
Go ahead
See how far you get
Chorus
This country
Has a gun problem
And yet we are too
Damn obsessed with them
To admit it
Welcome to
How we got here
Verse 2
A teacher shot
By a six year old
And two mass shootings
In California
So close together
It's pathetic
That we somehow
Still don't get it
The availability
Of the guns
Without question
Is the biggest threat
To fucking everyone
But we are somehow
Still not ready for
That discussion
And that is what
Makes me sick
As well as what
Makes everyone
A damn target
Chorus
With no respect to Stephen
With no respect to Stephen implied or expressed, I think the assertion would be better phrased as, "Guns our tools. In the wrong hands, they assist in killing others." Well, couldn't someone kill a person with a hammer, or a pipe wrench? Yes---but guns are created and manufactured to fire a lethal projectile into living flesh and cause either damage or death. Hammers and pipe wrenches are not manufactured to that intent. Or, like orange juice and, say, poison: a person could choke to death on orange juice, but the jucie was not manufactured for that purpose; poison is manufactured with the sole purpose and intent to bring life, in some form, to a sudden end.
In my opinion (and I can speak for no other person), assault weapons should be entirely banned; possession of them should be criminalized; and ordinary guns should be owned only by those who can pass the most rigorous and demanding background check. Yes, gunlovers will cry loudly about second amendment rights (does anyone else ever speak so much about other amendments), but the Founders were not able to foresee the "arms" would become, and what the "right to bear" them would allow. In just the same way that the Founders could not foresee or admit the reasons to end human chattel slavery, so their perspective, given the era in which they lived, was narrow. Hindsight is always more clear than foresight. The Founders could not foresee, and probably could not have predicted, factorized mass production, so the proliferation of guns and firearms would not have seemed to them the kind of problem it is now.
Starward
Bottom Line
It is both the overwhelming availability of as well as the over obsession with guns that have brought us to the gun problems we face today. Imagine if we actually ever actually approached the problem logically as a country instead of as a country so paranoid it could never imagine surviving without most people owning guns.
Pardon my jumping in, but you
Pardon my jumping in, but you make a fair point about the founders. They are sometimes turned into gods, which they were absolutely nothing near. Quite a few of them pushed for a revolution to avoid having to pay compiled debts to banks in England (large loan debts, not specifically taxes), Samuel Adams took great pleasure in leadings the tarring and feathering of his business opponents when ever he could use their loyalist ties to turn a crowd against them and Thomas Jefferson stopped talking about ending slavery after he realized - in a letter to Washington - that "breeding" his own slaves would make slavery far more profitable (which he then even proceeded to directly "donate" his own sperm to achieving).
Washington, meanwhile, participated in quite a few fraudulent land schemes in New York State (so did Hamilton) - using his surveyor license to doctor land titles and sell the same piece of land to multiple people (who sometimes had gun battles to the death while he counted cash safely in the distance, speaking of guns). That's not even close to the worst thing Washington did, of course. His massacre of indigenous people in what is now Michigan while in the British Military essentially was the powder keg for the "French and Indian" War. Of course, there were plenty of slave owners, elitists who didn't believe most people should vote, and monetary manipulators (purposely issuing worthless money) among the group. In short, the constitution and each of it's amendments needs to stand on their own merits, not on the shoulders of men who weren't quite the giants many would like to believe. At their best, they were very intelligent men. But they were, more than not, extremely flawed to say the least.
Beyond that, I don't wish to offer any other specific thoughts on guns at this current hour. But I wanted to nod to your sentiments about the founders not being infallable.