I am using the generic term being repeatedly thrown out by assorted posters in this thread so these questions are for them, not me. I don't believe any of them have even thought about these questions before posting.
They're for everybody, including you. You had asked "what's next if we take the guns away?", but it's the same problem because you're not saying what guns are being taken, how they're being taken, who they're being taken from etc. For example, changing the legal age from 18 to 21 takes away guns for 3 years but puts them back in their hands 3 years later so it's temporary. Taking assault rifles away from people is entirely different. Taking the right to have guns away from people with domestic abuse convictions is something else again. The process and the results are all different. There's a variety of situations where "taking away" could reply. Would "taking guns away" have an impact? Sure, but on who and under what circumstances? The impact varies depending on the legislation, for better or for worse. To have good discussions we should be clear and precise as to what aspect we're discussing. That goes for the "gun control" label too.
"gun control" is like saying "infrastructure changes" or "agricultural reform". It's utterly meaningless without identifying what specifically within that giant category is potentially being changed, in order to provide context. It's a terribly abused catch-all term. We keep hearing people say "no guns for anybody" or "you'll have to pry it out of my dead hands" but practical applications of common sense gun laws lie somewhere in the middle. Since no one can agree on what the middle looks like it is the mess it is. Further muddling the issue is the economics of it. That's the main issue, really. The big money behind the campaigns cares less about who owns what than who can purchase and own what. People like to talk about "gun control" like it some kind of magic pill. but control is never going to show up as some kind of omnibus bill because it would never, ever pass and everyone knows that, so trying to describe it in those terms might be fun but it's pointless. Everybody can't wait to get on their red or blue party horse and start screaming rhetoric supporting the platform nobody seems to want to discuss individual issues, and that's where any potential change is going to happen. In real world terms you need to discuss individual initiatives and stop using blanket terms if you're going to have any kind of meaningful discussion. There's a lot of different levers that can be pushed up and down when discussion potential legislation. So, issues like mental illness and weapons, criminal or domestic convictions and guns, legal age to own guns, types of weapons that can be owned, ghost guns, repurchase or seizure of certain weapons, carry permits, concealment permits, weapons possession in certain public spaces, laws against weapon modifications, etc etc etc ad nauseum all need to be considered in their own separate bubbles and in their individual pieces of legislation to see whether they make sense and whether a consensus can be arrived at, instead of thinking that one piece is necessarily a gateway to all the others, or that everything needs to be lumped together. With some individual issues we might find that there's some broad agreement if we're not trying to incorporate everything else into the discussion at the same time.. Unfortunately all we seem to get are conversations whether everything is painted with the same brush and neither logic nor real applications in the real world work that way.
