Reactionary laws to one-time or rare events are a terrible idea. My thoughts are that if the 2nd amendment is repealed then there will be a civil war. Because criminals do bad things is not a reason to take away things from law abiding citizens. Law abiding citizens should be required to give up their guns only when governments and criminals have given up all of theirs or when government can guarantee everyone's safety (which will be never).

Pushing for repeal of the second amendment will just make the left look crazy and will cause them to lose support. A Constitutional repeal of the second amendment is a practical impossibility and not much of a threat in any event and certainly not something likely to trigger a compromise.

The purpose of the second amendment is to prevent a tyrannical government (whether internal or external) from taking your rights away. It was a reaction to the British government's (their own government at the time) attempts to seize the American colonists weapons (which was one of the things that led to the Revolutionary War). It's easy to look at our lives now and say that another Hitler could never rise to power, or that the government would never try to quarter troops in your homes, or never try to forcibly suppress speech, (or seize your weapons one might have thought not too long ago), or whatever. But the fact is these sorts of things happen around the world all the time. Even if you believe these things aren't likely to happen in this country today, who knows what 10 years or 100 years will bring. If you allow the government to have all the guns now, there is no protection for the future. A criminal doing a bad things isn't a reason to take away MY rights.

The second amendment isn't for collecting or sports shooting. That kind of language in a law would be contradictory to the second amendment. A legitimate reason for owning a gun according to the second amendment is because you want one. It is a right. The primary reason the amendment exists is for the protection of oneself and their property. Someone shooting up a school is no more a reason to take away guns than someone driving a car into a crowd of people is a reason to take away cars. Or drunk drivers are a reason to take away alcohol (probably a better example). The hysteria against guns is all out of proportion with the statistics. You are far more likely to die in a car accident (or any number of other things) than to be shot and statistically you'll win the lottery a couple of times before you die in a mass shooting. What some consider "sensible" others consider "absurd" and therein lies the problem.

Nothing increases gun sales like the threat to take guns away. I don't even want an AR-15. The only gun I own is a shotgun inherited from my grandfather which I've fired exactly once (well, twice...it's double barrel). However, if there starts to be serious talk about repealing the second amendment I'm going out and buying two (well, probably only one...but definitely one).

The civil war is a whole other conversation. Even if you take it as an example where guns didn't work against a tyrannical government (and in the case of the civil war, both sides were being pretty tyrannical in any event, just in different ways), it isn't a reason to take guns away or to suggest it isn't a deterrent or a valid means of defense against tyranny.

Most of these arguments are moot anyway. Guns can already be 3D printed and while an AR-15 type weapon isn't possible yet, it's only a matter of time.

If you really want to fix the biggest problems with the medical industry then do things that will increase competition, not limit it. Remove AMA restrictions on the number of doctors that Universities can train, allow more competition in the insurance industry, have reasonably sane patent laws, tort reform, etc, and re-examine all existing regulations. Unless those problems are fixed, costs will continue to rise and the fact that you are paying it with tax dollars instead of medical bills won't matter much to the middle class (i.e. most of the country). We have to treat insurance as insurance, not as a managed plan to pay for all healthcare. Insurance is supposed to be for catastrophic expenses. A hospital stay, an emergency room visit, treatment for chronic disease. Not a doctor's visit or birth control or a flu shot. If government is to pay for such things than it needs to be done through a welfare type program, not "insurance".

I would also point out that just because Republicans have an idea, doesn't mean it is "right wing" (and certainly not necessarily "conservative"). There is nothing conservative about Obamacare. Nothing. I don't know if it was intended to help the insurance industry but I don't know that you can say that it has. At least, most insurance companies have pulled out of the exchanges and in many places there are few plans to choose from. In any event, Obamacare was pushed through as law with exactly 0 Republican support so the Democrats could have really done whatever they wanted with that law. It's not like they could have lost any more Republican support because they had none. Obamacare is why we have Trump today (whom I am not a fan of either). The government taking over an entire industry is a terrible idea. Obamacare has demonstrated that. Obamacare has made healthcare more expensive for myself and most of the middle class. Obamacare doesn't seem to have even done a particularly good job of doing what it was advertised to do which was to insure the uninsured. This country can't even manage the current entitlement expenses it has and currently has no plan to account for the increase in spending that will be necessary for social security in coming years.

I don't know where you lived where there was so much violence. I was lucky...never had a gun pulled on me or known anyone who did. But the fact of the matter is, if it had been a gang armed with knives you would have been in much the same situation.

Also, what your statistics don't show it the number of crimes prevented because law abiding citizens had guns. In most cases when a gun is used in a defensive manner, it is not fired. The threat of it is usually enough to scare away criminals. Most criminals are looking for easy targets and most gun owners aren't actually looking to try to kill people. Whether any of these arguments resonate with you isn't the point. Yours don't resonate with me either. So? The point is you don't have the RIGHT to tell me I can't own a gun and if you (or anybody else...I'm using "you" generically here) is going to use force to take one from me or to prevent me from buying one then you are the one in the wrong because you are initiating force, not me.