... these wicked people are only interested in bringing the European and British misanthropic anti-RKBA policies to America, and being deceitful is completely on the table. For them, stripping us naked of our innate civil and human right to keep and bear arms, is such a morally superior end, that they'll happily use dishonest and lying and duplicitous tactics with zero bothering done to their conscience.
So that's essentially what the status quo side has to work with. Demonize the effort/messenger, touch upon the right to bear just about any weapon as being tied to a civil, human right to do it.
Meanwhile, do we want to reduce the likelihood that we'll die because someone exercising Nihilo's notion has a very different agenda? If the answer to that is yes, then something has to change.
But what? A few ideas have been suggested.
Idea one: put more guns in the hands of good guys.
And on some level that feels right to a lot of us with good intentions and familiarity with how to handle a weapon effectively. But it's a horrible idea. Why? Because without the mandatory safety training most of the people who believe in idea also oppose for weapons, you're actually making the world and your street a more dangerous place.
Many studies, like ones by
Kellerman and others, including those supported by fairly prominent and widely respected groups like the CDC, have told us that increased numbers of guns actually made the people who owned them more likely to die violently. The reasons for this are less well defined, but include an increase in suicides, accidental shootings and, more speculatively, the answer that people who feel more secure may then take more risks than those who are a bit more nervous.
The NRA response was to attack the CDC and anyone promoting that sort of information as "junk science" while seeing to it that elements of Congress they've bought (I noted the remarkable amount of money they funnel into Congress previously) inserted a rider into future CDC funding prohibiting their advocating gun control of any sort.
Idea two: ban guns altogether in terms of private ownership. Okay, that would work, but it runs afoul of our rights and presupposes that the cost/benefit analysis rationally leads to this point of severity. And it would work a hardship on legitimate hunters, whose typical weapons aren't and largely haven't been a part of the problem.
Idea three: look at models that support the right to own firearms while making the safe ownership of them possible within a larger structure of law that significantly reduces the likelihood of an abuse of the right to harm others, especially the sort of harm found in mass shootings, both in terms of injury and fatality as well as in the psychological damage that radiates out from it, the impediment of the quiet enjoyment of our property and person.
To accomplish that we should look at real world, active experiments in how to strike that balance that preserves the right, but with sufficient restrictions to minimize the abuse. And fortunately those experiments and results are within easy reach. They're found in every Western democracy doing a remarkably better job at preserving lives through universal and intelligently motivated gun laws.