Unadulterated posted...
And if it isn't guns, they'd find something else to harm people with. There are worse things than guns.
A couple days after Sandy Hook, there was a mass stabbing in China. The gun nuts seized that as a chance to say "look! You don't need guns to kill lots of people!", as they so often do. The problem? Said mass stabbing resulted in three injuries and no fatalities, in stark contrast to 25+ dead (and that perpetrator was a grown man and not a teenager).
There are worse things than guns, certainly, but guns strike a unique balance between effectiveness and accessibility. Sure, you can get a knife or a baseball bat even more easily than you can a gun regardless of gun control, but you can't do nearly as much harm with it (especially if you aren't significantly stronger than whoever you attack). Sure, you can do more harm with well-placed explosives, but those are significantly harder to make/buy (in part due to measures controlling them, but also due to the simple technical reality that explosives are dangerous to work with) and make use of. This why people are so adamant about defending them: If alternatives existed that worked just as well, nobody would care about guns being taken away because they could just use those alternatives. That's an argument that defeats itself before you add the period.
Unadulterated posted...
I can agree with a lot of what you listed and a lot of that is already done as well.
And that's what people talk about when they talk about "common sense gun control." Some of it is done to some extent or another (like there is already a registry, but it's barely functional because the NRA has lobbied so hard to keep it that way), but you need all of that (or a quite of similar measures) to actually control things. Again, though, most of those are things responsible gun owners do voluntarily (not so much the recertification process, but the safe storage and whatnot), which makes them pretty agreeable. Many owners, however, are not so responsible, and those are the ones that such measures aim to crack down on to reduce accidents and the ability of people who should not own guns to access them.
Unadulterated posted...
Mental health is something that really needs to be addressed. That's the main thing, imo.
It's a major part of it, but at the end of the day the problem is specifically mentally ill people with guns. As others have pointed out, the US is not the only country in the world with mental illness, but it is the only country in the world (that isn't an active war zone) that suffers from an epidemic of mass murder. Mental illness rates in the US may be higher than some other countries, but not by the orders of magnitude by which its mass murder rates are higher.
Mental health does need to be addressed (and not just because of mass shootings, though the abysmal state of US health care is a much broader scope than this topic), but along with that the ability of mentally ill or otherwise unfit people to access guns also needs to be addressed. That's what more robust screening and licensing measures can solve, along with more strictly codifying and enforcing the responsibility of licensed gun owners to keep guns out of the hands of people that haven't been screened. "It's a mental health problem!" is a short-sighted cop-out for addressing the reality of the matter.
Unadulterated posted...
Bad guys would still get them.
Every illegally-owned gun was owned legally at some point in its supply chain. That truth is getting a bit muddied with the rise of "ghost guns," but the fact remains that better controlling the legal supply of guns will reduce the number of people that own guns illegally. You're never going to stamp it out entirely, but you don't need to stamp it out entirely. You just need to make improvements.
Unadulterated posted...
You have the right to defend yourself. [...]
People are so naive to the real world.
Fun fact: Gun owners are more likely than those who don't own guns to be victimized by violent crime. Now, whether that's because people who are more likely to be victimized by violent crime are more likely to buy a gun to protect themselves or because people who own guns are more likely to escalate criminal situations that otherwise wouldn't have been violent, it's hard to say (though I believe most studies do correct for region, SES, race, gender, and other factors that might have made somebody more vulnerable to violent crime before looking at the effect guns have, which favours the latter interpretation), but real-world statistics suggest that "defending yourself" by owning a gun actually has the opposite effect from making you safer.
darkknight109 posted...
The idea that anyone who "lashes out" is mentally unwell simply isn't true. That logic would be just as applicable to other crimes. Wouldn't anyone who "lashes out" by killing a single person, rather than a group, also be mentally unwell by your definition? Or even someone who just violently attacks another person?
Not everyone who is violent is mentally unwell; some are simply evil.
I actually would go so far as to say that most crimes
are
a consequence of poor mental health, and even "simply evil" is arguably a matter of mental illness in and of itself (most obviously, antisocial personality disorder is explicitly identified as a mental disorder, and that kind of lack of empathy is common to most/all "evil" people). That's getting into - for lack of a better term - "small-m mental health" more so than more discretely identifiable mental disorders, though, and that's a much, much broader concept. It's roughly analogous to being in good physical shape vs. not being in good shape: You may not have anything specifically wrong with you if you aren't in good shape, but you're not as healthy as you would be with a more active lifestyle and better diet, and that poorer health increases the risk of later developing a more formal disorder. Good mental health is more than just not having a mental disorder, it's a matter of being in a comfortable place mentally and emotionally, which in turn is a product of pretty much everything about your environment, personal history, and attitudes toward the world around you.
Now, is that kind of mental health something that can be treated at a policy level if there are problems? In some ways. Just like opening a gym or walking trail nearby can encourage people in a neighbourhood to get in better physical shape, environmental problems that contribute to poor mental health can be improved by beautifying a neighbourhood, addressing noise pollution, improving traffic safety (beyond the obvious physical benefits, it's just plain less stressful to face less danger walking/driving around), opening community centres, and other such things. The non-environmental aspects are a lot harder to deal with, though, and mostly involve helping people learn effective coping strategies for whatever mental health issues they have (which falls more into more formal mental health care).