Donald Trump the Megathread part II - Mod Warning updated in OP 12/2/26

I really wanted to do this on the other thread, but OK.

If I may quote the constitution of one state, population just over ten million:

"The right to defend one's own life or life of another person also with arms is guaranteed under conditions set out in the law." The mechanism for this is in legislation: "The right to acquire, possess and bear arms is guaranteed under the conditions laid down in this Act."

One in thirty adults are licensed to carry a concealed firearm in public, with over a million privately owned firearms in circulation. Unlike in most jurisdictions, there are few 'gun free zones', carry in schools, bars, etc is permitted under the law.

The most recent murder rate per 100,000, in 2024, is less than that of Ireland. (0.64 per 100k, vs Ireland's 0.76). The murder rate by firearm trends under 0.1 per 100k, about the same as Australia, less than the UK. To give credit to the Gardai, the numbers of firearms related homicides in Ireland have plummeted over the past two decades to the level that officially it's not even reported (though it's 0.03/100k near as I can tell). Due to lack of firearms, almost all of the murdering in Ireland is being done by some other method. For whatever satisfaction that is to the victims or their families.

Maybe it's not just the guns?

Ireland and the US both have laws which allow the lethal use of firearms in self defense. When it happens in Ireland, it's national news, it's so rare. Maybe once a year there's a justifiable homicide: Ireland had its 2025 case (Mr Phelan) already. Of course, it's somewhat self-fulfilling since few firearms are made available to defend with no matter what the laws on self defense are. They do, however, work very well for the job. There's a reason why police have them, it's not so they can arbitrarily execute people. The last time I'm aware of that the US government looked into it (Obama era CDC-sponsored study after Sandy Hook), a conclusion was that the use of a firearm provided the highest likelihood of surviving an encounter without injury than any other self-defense strategy. They work.

Ireland's private citizen justifiable homicide rate, members of the public, not police, lawfully defending themselves against attackers, is something like 0.015/100k, the US's is 0.15. There is a societal benefit, I think, in being ten times more likely for a private citizen to prevail where there is the level of threat that killing is justified. Whether that benefit is worth the downside can be argued, but cannot be ignored.

That's the hard figure where we know that lethal force was justified given there was a body and it wasn't murder, the figure for "Defensive gun uses" which simply involves defending oneself with a firearm without necessarily firing is hotly debated with differing definitions and thus differing results. Pro-gun figures will give you 4-6 million. Universities will give more like 1.5 million. The afore-mentioned post Sandy-Hook report states "Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million, in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008." Even if you take the absolutely most restrictive definition and thus smallest result, the NCVS figure of 65,000 is 1.5 times higher than the number of US gun deaths, and over three times higher than the number of firearms-caused homicides.

It is disingenuous, or at least willfully ignorant, to deny that there is a benefit to society from the prevalence of firearms which needs to be factored into policy, and this is before any other pragmatic uses such as farming or wilderness survival. It is far more than simply "guns are designed to kill, thus are bad" and a level of nuance and weighting is required. One must also observe that the genie is out of the bottle, and that with hundreds of millions of firearms in circulation already (not to mention the possibility of new production: I was in the back rooms at Royal Armouries in Leeds this week, and saw 3D printed firearms varying from the original Liberator to much better and capable machineguns, it's now a valid concern in the UK), so an Irish-style solution may not even be practicable.