There are plenty of avenues of life where, if you simply reduce things to an actuarial equation, it is obvious that something is bad for you.
1.Smoking. Over-drinking. Drink-driving. Opioid use. Fried foods. Failure to wear a seatbelt. Bike helmets. Gambling CERTAINLY doesn't add up. Gun possession.
Preliminarily, let's tritely call those reasons 'CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES'.
All of these are a clear actuarial fail if you just reduce things down to statistics. Should be obvious not to do, but, people still do them. These are habits, which can be broken.
2.Then there are what one might call 'INDUSTRIAL INFLUENCES' with respect TO those things.
- Gambling ads during footy matches.
- Cigarette advertising targeting kids.
- Pharmaceutical companies paying doctors to prescribe painkillers.
- The mass manufacture of guns. This contributes to a proliferation of guns beyond what the populous needs, making them cheap and available
- Product positioning of cigarettes in movies.
Check. Roger that. Loud and clear.
This is the influence of organizations, like the NRA, which can be formidable, but even formidable institutions can be stopped.
However, it does not make one guilty of denying the existence of THOSE influences to also concede that there are EVEN DEEPER factors that can, and do, contribute to the presence of those behaviors in society. Then there are:
3.ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS:
a. At a time when there wasn't home plumbing, drinking beer was the best access people had to clean drinking water. This led to incessant alcohol consumption.
b. The absence of affordable alternatives to driving home after a night out in rural and regional areas. This leads to drink driving.
c. Food deserts. The term is used in the US to refer to areas where supermarket chains won't set up shop, but, there is a similar issue in Australia with respect to remote shops that only stock pies, pasties, Chiko rolls, and soft drink. This leads to poor diets, including high consumption of fatty foods and the associated illnesses.
d. The perception (rightly or wrongly) that one needs a gun because others have them and pose a threat.
However, in the case of American law, with respect to guns, there is even a 4th ISSUE, all its own, that doesn't belong in these other three categories.
4.That is that the entire premise of the country is based on a state that is subordinate to the individual and not the other way around - the 'free person.'
The word 'amendment' doesn't sound like much if you say it fast, but:
a. PLENTY of amendments fail
b. Almost all take YEARS to pass; and
c. The reason that they pass or fail pertains to how 'in-keeping' with the concept of the superior citizen they are
That's WHY, for example, prohibition changed, and then was changed back.
- Not for kicks.
- Not to provide an example for people who don't know shit about American law to quote later, to say ' Obviously, nothing is written in stone ... so I don't understand why they don't just change the Constitution'
- Not because the mood of the nation on the issue changed and then changed back.
....but, because the intial ban, called 'prohibition' contradicted the concept of the superior citizen or 'free' person.
The Temperance movement (or Teetotalism) sought a ban on alcohol. The movement eventually became powerful enough to get it, in the form of having 18th Amendment passed, which banned alcohol, nationally.
Four years later, however, the 21st Amendment passed, which simply repealed the 18th, because the 18th put the state's authority ahead of the individual's choice.
The uninformed just see this two 'changes' and can't understand why there can't just be 3,745 other 'changes' whenever the mood strikes the fancy of the electorate, like when a goldfish sees something 'over here' or 'over there.'
[I actually heard an ABC News US foreign correspondent, argue this point, rhetorically, on camera. She probably thought she was being clever, but she just came off uninformed and under-qualified for the assignment.]
This is precisely why proponents of the legalization of marijuana feel they have a similar argument, and that the War on Drugs is a pretense for something more sinister than public safety. There is a precedent for their argument in the form of prohibition of alcohol.
That's why the 18th was repealed. It was deemed a governmental over-reach of the rights of the free individual for prohibition to have ever passed in the first place, and that's WITHOUT an explicit amendment giving people the right to drink alcohol. (Hm! Maybe everything old ISN'T 'outdated' just because it is old. Perhaps 2+2 still equals 4 after all of this time.)
Now, why WOULDN'T a gun ban suffer the same fate as prohibition?
In nations where citizens are considered subjects OF the government, this is a foreign concept. Their heads probably already hurt this far into the explanation.
In those countries, the state outranks the person. Everything seems quite simple. "Just ban it," they say, in their best Marie Antoinette. Like a drover, pushing cattle to where the water is (or to the slaughterhouse as the case may be).
Australian HANDED that right over. It was a THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE to turn those weapons in. That will doesn't exist in the US. Those who don't want guns around already don't own them. All that remains is for those who want them gone to exert their will, through the state, by proxy, on those who have them.
That's precisely what the US was designed NOT to do to the 'free' individual - become an instrument of suppression on behalf of a fraction of the population - to become a de facto ruling class or royals.
Would a ban actually eliminate the guns? Or would it be like Cuban cigars, black caviar, cocaine or marijuana where, technically, it's illegal, but, if you travel in the right circles, someone 'knows a guy who knows a guy' and only the common person without those connections gets locked up for it.
In a society based on the concept of the 'free person' though, how do you take the right to own a gun off of the citizen, leave it exclusively to the police (who already shoot people in questionable circumstances themselves, a la NFL kneeling protests), and NOT have that legislation later repealed, because it, like prohibition before it, is not in keeping with the fundamental concept of the superior citizen?
It's a Catch 22.
Reasons 1, 2 and 3, above, are not the problem. Those reasons can be overcome, as any Australian will be happy to point out to you (even if you didn't ask).
It's reason 4.