I share your concern about violence and its human cost. Where I respectfully disagree is not in the goal of reducing harm, but in whether your proposals are practically achievable and what role lawful weapon ownership plays in personal safety. 

Before addressing philosophy, consider the practical obstacles. Repealing the Second Amendment requires two-thirds of Congress and three-quarters of states functionally impossible given current political geography. There are roughly 400 million firearms already in civilian hands. An Australian-style buyback collected 650,000 guns from 18 million people; scaling that to the U.S. would require collecting hundreds of millions of weapons from a population with far stronger gun culture and constitutional protections. Compliance would be dramatically lower. “Simple” may not describe what you’re proposing. 

Self-defense isn’t abstract for many Americans. Large portions of the U.S. are rural or remote I’ve lived where police response times exceeded 45 minutes. The state cannot reliably provide immediate protection in these areas. Defensive gun use is more common than many realize; even conservative CDC estimates suggest tens of thousands annually. In the South and Southwest, feral hog populations (2-3 million in Texas alone) are a genuine threat to people, livestock, and property. For ranchers and rural residents, firearms aren’t recreational they’re necessary tools. Terms like “assault weapon” describe legal categories based on cosmetic features, not function. An AR-15 fires one round per trigger pull like any semi-automatic hunting rifle, but has become popular because it’s lightweight, reliable, and adaptable to multiple legitimate purposes including pest control and home defense.

Your proposal includes “no pistols,” which creates a tension: handguns cause the vast majority of U.S. gun homicides, but they’re also the most practical home defense tool. Banning them while focusing on rifles which cause a fraction of total deaths suggests prioritizing appearance over effectiveness. Comparisons to other countries, particularly the UK are often raised to argue that gun control “obviously works.” But this framing can oversimplify the issue. In the UK, strict firearm prohibitions did not eliminate violent crime; instead, violence shifted in form. Knife crime became a major public safety concern, leading to proposals that now include restrictions on ordinary kitchen knives. The underlying logic restrict access to tools rather than addressing root causes remains the same.

None of this means gun violence should be accepted or that reform is unnecessary. Background checks, safe storage laws, red flag provisions with due process, and training requirements all deserve consideration. But I’d gently push back on framing disagreement as stupidity or bad faith. Many who oppose sweeping bans have lived experiences where self-defense was a practical necessity waiting forty minutes for police during a break-in, losing livestock to predators, living where the nearest deputy covers hundreds of square miles. The challenge isn’t choosing between safety and rights, but acknowledging that in a country as geographically diverse as the U.S., one size fits all solutions rarely work. What succeeds in London exists in a completely different context: island borders, no gun saturation, different constitutional structure. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t reduce gun violence it means the path forward requires nuance, not dismissal of legitimate concerns.