By some estimates (likely conservative), there are more than 300 million guns in private hands in the US. What we don't lack is guns. What we do lack is power.
Underneath the political trappings that dictate how it is wielded in "normal" times, power ultimately comes down to a question of the ability to force others to comply even against their will, and the ability of those others to resist. As Chinese communist dictator Mao Zedong famously put it, "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." He should know, having taken power in a civil war by force of arms and then presided over a nation where ordinary people were largely disarmed and defenseless and his regime was able to murder and starve them by the millions.
The documentary film "Innocents Betrayed" discusses the history, in country after country including the United States, of how laws disarming ordinary people have gone hand in hand with State oppression, and how hundreds of millions of people have died in democides (genocide by governments against "their own" people) as a result. You can watch it for free on YouTube -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUmKT43j4Tc -- and I urge anyone who thinks civilian gun control is a good idea to do so.
I don't think our biggest problem is that the citizenry will be disarmed by banning assault rifles, requiring background checks prior to purchase, taxing ammunition, teaching alternative dispute resolution, providing greater access to mental health services, etc.
Bans on "assault rifles" (an artificial, media-invented term; any weapon can be used in an assault), "background checks" (you don't suppose such checks could be subject to any racial or class profiling or manipulation by those in power, do you?), ammunition taxes (little steps toward making self defense affordable only for the wealthy)... all seemingly "minor" changes in and of themselves -- no big deal, advocates of civilian gun control want us to think. Yet what they are trying to do, bit by bit, is chip away at the right and ability of ordinary people to keep and bear arms.
No matter how well armed the populace is, the state is always capable of bringing more firepower to the battle.
That's usually the case right now because governments have amassed too much power relative to the people in whose names they rule. But their superior arsenals don't necessarily guarantee they will prevail against a determined populace. The U.S. government was capable of bringing -- and in fact brought -- much more firepower to the Vietnam War than Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Cong did, but still lost the war. In Afghanistan, the relatively poorly armed Taliban have been holding their own against the armed might of the U.S. government for years. It has been shown repeatedly that a lightly armed, grassroots resistance movement can check and sometimes outright defeat the forces of a much more powerful State. Especially when the loyalty of the State's forces is often in question, and the people they're trying to oppress and control are fighting for their own families, communities, and sometimes sheer survival. (Not that I'm saying the Taliban have such noble motivations.)
The U.S. government seems invincible to any real domestic resistance today, only because it still enjoys a high enough level of support to make outright resistance to its predations impractical. But the percentage of Americans who trust and support those in power continues to drop, even as those in power arrogantly continue to tighten their control and the country looks more and more like a police state. If these trends continue, at some point the equation changes, and at that point the military balance of power between the people and the regime will become a much more relevant matter. When governments lose enough popular support that they can no longer exercise their monopoly of force with impunity or enjoy the unquestioning loyalty of their own personnel, bolder acts of non-cooperation and even liberation become possible that would be unthinkable under present circumstances. Today for instance, an armed raiding party descending on a state or federal prison and demanding the release of all political prisoners would be met with fierce resistance and its members mercilessly hunted down and prosecuted. But under a more authoritarian government with less popular support, prison guards might just decide that releasing the prisoners made more sense than risking their own safety, especially if some of them sympathize with the rescuers, who after the raid was effectuated, might vanish into sympathetic communities instead of being reported to the authorities.
We are not going to achieve social justice through the barrel of a gun. What we lack is not weapons but a conscious well organized mass movement.
No, armed force by itself won't achieve social justice. And I for one have no desire to see a violent mass conflict in this country. But we need to understand the importance of the relative military strength of government and the people, and see more clearly the long-term risks of letting the people become comparatively weakened, and how this risk measures against the risk posed by things like school shootings. (I'll set aside here the fact that such shootings would actually be less frequent if more people were armed, since many people believe the opposite). Whatever one believes to be true about the causes of civilian-on-civilian shootings, the fact is that over time the casualties of such shootings have been far, far fewer than the number of people killed by government soldiers, police, and other agents of bloodthirsty regimes. The imbalance in the military equation noted above ("the state is always capable of bringing more firepower") should be viewed as a problem to solve, not with a "resistance is futile" sense of resignation that if push comes to shove we must kneel down and lick the boots of our masters! There are two basic ways to address it:
1) Prevent any further infringements on the 2nd Amendment, and fight to reclaim the ability of ordinary civilians to keep and bear arms
2) Seek to reduce the government's arsenal and limit the conditions under which government agents are able to wield weapons on behalf of the State
Allowing ordinary people to lose their access to firearms a little at a time, on the other hand, will make the imbalance even worse, and increase the likelihood that tyranny and democide will occur. To most people living in relative peace and prosperity, these threats are not "real", because we don't tend to look at the sweep of history and really comprehend how our own present circumstances are just a blip on this timeline. It seems to be human nature to think things will stay more or less the way they are in our present. Although most Americans are probably at least vaguely aware that many people live under tyranny, and that genocides and democides have repeatedly happened in places around the world (including, in past centuries, in the U.S.), and continue to happen up to the present, the prevailing assumption in this country in 2015 probably remains that "something like that could never happen here and now".
Cherokees in the 1700s, Germans in the late 1920s, Bosnians in the early 1990s, Syrians in the late 2000s, and many others, would probably be able to relate.
Love & Liberty,
((( starchild )))
"The most common way that people give up power is by assuming they don't have any."
-Alice Walker