Ditto, there are crazy people in the US (yes, I am from the US), just like anywhere else, and yeah, sometimes they will do crazy things.  Hopefully no retarded politician will take this story and go crazy with it...

My 45 sitting behind me loaded with hollow points disagrees with you.

Monsters exist, some of them start killing early.  Be the one with the gun instead of the victim.

You know why people with the gun are never the victim? Because they are the perpetrator...

It isn't only the mentally ill that commit crimes. Violent crimes of passion and opportunity exist as well.

In addition, are you implying that all criminals are mentally ill (this is not a challenge, but I really would like to hear your thoughts on this)? I would be willing to argue that for some (organized criminals, for example) violence can be construed as another tool in an aggressive marketplace (biker gangs trying to dominate the meth trade, for example) and is not the result of being mentally ill.

When crime is rampant, the call becomes 'Lock them all away and throw away the key' because it would seem to be the panacea for all crime...until there are not enough prisons and too many criminals and no one wants a prison in their zip code. Then it becomes a problem. Now the call is 'treat the mentally ill' and gun violence will be reduced. I fear that the mentally ill are the targets for those who wish to blame one group for violence.

Can you force someone to undergo treatment if they do not wish to? There are very few medical illness that I am aware of, where compulsory treatment can be mandated (I have heard of one case where a judge was considering forcing a TB patient to undergo treatment-an airborne illness. Mental illness is not communicable).

In addition, who will determine who is mentally ill? People in the wild have to be screened; someone has to make the determination that they may be MI (mentally ill). If I come back from lunch break and I am glowering at all my co-workers (because I stubbed my toe), does someone from HR have to call 911 for paramedics because I look upset? Should they talk to me first? What if I do not want to talk to HR or anyone else? Should they call SWAT? Forget the office scenario-what about in a neighborhood? Do we all keep an eye out for our neighbors who are 'acting strangely'...such as not rooting for the local football team on Sundays?

Who is going to pay for the screening or the treatment? Do we have enough MI providers to handle the load? What do we do when a patient finishes treatment? Presumably they are well now, right? Will they be hired? Can they live in your neighborhood?

Mental illness is a problem, yes. The MI should not have access to any tool that can be EASILY used to harm people who would not have a REASONABLE chance to defend themselves (they can use brooms...I would be hesitant to allow them access to driving a bus). But implying that solely identifying/treating the MI will reduce gun violence/crime is an incorrect assumption, in my opinion.

Guns need to be accounted for. If you want to buy four at the local gun show, go for it. If you pass the background check, let no one stand in your way. But the guns should be registered to you, and if the police or the ATF asks you in two years to provide proof that you still own the guns (preventing strawman purchases), I cannot see why it would be a burden (you have to register your car, right?). If you sold the guns, that is fine. Inform your local PD of the sale, have the purchaser go to the FBI and fill out a background form and if s/he passes, the gun is theirs. The gun now has a pedigree and can be accounted for from creation to the final owner. Is that too much to ask?

Most gun related deaths in the US are suicides.  Crime statistics show substantially higher crime rates in Europe, despite more uniform populations(most of ours is racially driven inner city violence) and severely strict gun laws.  You are about twice as likely to be raped in the UK for instance, something that happens many times more frequently than being murdered.

Intentional Homicide and Homicide by Gun statistics also count acts of self defense.  As would be expected, in a country where tens of millions carry, there are more badguys getting shot by guns.  It counts every single shooting death caused by a cop or armed citizen in self defense.  Despite our obsession with guns in this country, the people murdered with guns are only about 20% of the total murders.

You do have a lower murder rate, but it's mainly cultural.  There is very little gang violence in western Europe, you just don't have roving bands of armed drug dealers warring over turf.  We do.  It results in the murder rate in D.C. being eight times higher than the national average, despite European style gun laws there.  We got ours because of our idiotic drug laws that make things like pot serious business, but not serious enough that people get serious jail time for being involved in it.

Well, every single one of the mass-shootings going back to Columbine were perpetrated by people with a history of mental illness.

I had really never heard those stadistics (particularly about crime being higher in Europe). Would you mind linking your sources? I would like to check it, it seems quite curious. 

Even though, I still think that there is an important difference: crimes without guns have less probability of being mortal. Attacks by crazy people without easy access to guns have less probability of leaving corpses laying arround. I insist: just check the case of the crazy guy in China. Making it harder and more controlled to have a gun reduces the amount of guns on the streets and even on the hands of bad guys. And, really, it is just like  flagyl said: don't you need to register your car?

 Edit: Since I was curious for data and the such, I've decided to make a little bit of googling. Of course, this is far from a great survey, and I am by no means an expert (I studied literature, so I can barely read a graph ) Nevertheless, it appears that:

In this link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/interactive/2012/jul/22/gun-ownership-homicides-map

They show gun per capita and % of homicides that are caused by guns. In this case, it is not self defense nor suicide, I suspect. It shows very obvious things: US has more guns and more % of homicides with guns.

Now, I also found this: http://data.un.org/Data.aspx?d=UNODC&f=tableCode%3A1

According to which (if you sort the data by countries to UK and US), the US has more than double the rate of homicides that the UK. Of course, the US has drug wars, but I still think that it requires a lot of whisful thinking to not think that drug-dealers and cartels have it easier to get guns to use illegaly in the US. As far as I know (but then again, I'm no expert and not even British), the laws of the UK are not much more permissive with drugs that the US.

I don't think you can blame the guns for everything, but to argue that the amount of guns and easy access has nothing to do with all of it...

Careful, Americans love their guns and they cling to them like a drunk to his bottle.

What is lost in all the apologetic rationalizations if the fact that more guns just means more shot people, just like more cars means more car accidents. 

Many crimes are commited with stolen guns.

"I think you're crazy if you live in a city without being armed. " - this just sounds insane to me. I have been living in Czech, Europe whole my life, I never had a gun. Never thought I need it. None of my friends own guns. 

Just see Bowling for Columbine, IMO a very good movie. 

If that's your argument then why don't you wear a hardhat when you go out? Because that would be dorky whereas guns are cool?

That being said...

I kinda agree it's your right to carry. But implicitly with that choice, when you left your door in the morning, you accepted that "my mistakes will now have lethal consequences".

If someone dies or is seriously injured because you misjudged a situation when they would not have if you hadn't been carrying, then you accept the consequences for that decision you made when you left your home.

I'm not anti-gun, but what I am also not is pro-gun. I want the common law principle that you are responsible for your actions. I do not want carrying normalized with special protection from natural justice.

What does that mean?

Someone waves a gun in someones face to 'make a point'. Lock em up. No excuse.

They kill someone because they imagined they were "threatened".  Again, no excuse. You made your choice when you left your home.

re: those stats. They are not comparable at all. The american numbers are for the most serious crimes e.g. rape with violence or assault with serious injury, whereas the uk is counting every kind of sexual offense and any kind of harm (not necessarily even physical or intentional).

Your odds of having something dropped on your head that would injure you, but not kill you regardless of the existence of a hardhat, are more in line with your odds of being struck by lightning.  Your odds of getting raped or mugged are more in line with your odds of being in a serious car wreck, having a lengthy power outage, getting stranded.  Things you might not even be consciously aware of when you take precautions against them.  It's a likely event, instead of a freak accident.

Construction workers actually do face non-negligible risk levels, their employees, if not local laws, require them to wear hardhats.  Meanwhile, the government brain washes you from an early age that weapons are somehow wrong and need to be kept away from society despite the danger from less than scrupulous people.

Except "those stats" aren't what's been used, it's the detailed data that makes up the actual reports.  Violent crime statistics in the US come in a narrower form than that in the UK, but they're also specific and categorized.  It was a simple matter for inquisitive minds to compare crime specific statistics.  Instead of a 4-1 violent crime rate, the typical European country is closer to 2-1 over the US.

The rest of your post is of a similar nature to the hardhat.  There are a massive number of concealed carriers in this country.  They are vastly below the general population in criminal violations.  Law abiding citizens do not suddenly become animals simply because they have a gun.  Having a gun just means that if you get jumped by a guy twice your size, he's going to die instead of pulverize you to whatever degree he feels like achieving.  There are hundreds of times as many crimes stopped by legally carrying citizens as there are crimes committed by them.

Machine guns are illegal to buy now, how many homicides have been committed with legally owned machine guns?  Two.  One of them by a cop.  250,000 registered machine guns, half of them in the hands of private citizens for decades, and we have a grand total of one homicides to point at.  I can't have a minigun because the government is scared of people being sufficiently armed to demand their rights, not because thousands would die in a hail of bullets every year.

Gun laws are arbitrary nonsense as often as not, so called assault weapons are an outright absurdity.  The difference between a legal hunting rifle and a previously illegal assault rifle could be such nonsense as a bayonet mount.  An antiquated feature that stopped being intelligent when the revolver was invented.  A pistol grip will do it too, because everyone knows that a pistol grip makes a shoulder fired rifle better in some magical bullshit way.  The other big thing they go after, magazine capacity.  Guess what your odds are at taking down more than one assailant with 7 rounds as a casual gun owner?  The average cop shoots over five times to drop an assailant, they spend inordinate amounts of time on a shooting range practicing for that.  Hundreds of hours of range time is something Susie homemaker probably doesn't have when an armed rapist kicks her door in to have some alone time.  If you are the unpracticed average schmuck, you need a low caliber, high capacity magazine.  10 rounds for one person is being marginal with a .22 in such a situation.

I regularly shit on California for banning everything from slingshots to antique swords.  The NRA on the other hand is the National Rifle Association.  It may be a worthy cause to lynch all the asshole politicians that decided they had the right to tell you what kind of pocket knife you could carry, but the organization has a specific task.  It's also quite silly of you to point to obvious violations of your rights as an American citizen and use them as justification for further violations.  You're supposed to rebel against the oppressor, not bend over.

The perspective of a marginalized former slave.

It pains me to say this, seeing as this author works at my alma mater, but he presented not ONE data point. He SUPPOSES guns have saved hundreds of thousands of lives, but nowhere in the article does he describe even one event where his proposed scenario has occurred.

You would think, if for no other reason than for PR purposes, the NRA would catalog incidents where a gun was displayed but not fired, resulting in a crime averted...but I see no such data; in this article or elsewhere. I don't see the point of the article.

In edit-the reason this article lacks credibility is for this reason: 'Surveys of American gun owners have found that 4 to 6 percent reported using a gun in self-defense within the previous five years. That is not a very high percentage but, in a country with 300 million people, that works out to hundreds of thousands of defensive uses of guns per year.' Who conducted these surveys? Were they self-reports? Was a gun pulled because kids TP'd the lawn on Halloween? Was there an overt threat of violence? In addition, there are ~314,000,000 people in the U.S., but not all people in the U.S. own guns. It would have been of some value if he had bothered to give a rough estimate of how many gun owners there are in the U.S.

He may have a valid point, but presenting this as anything other than an Op Ed piece is disingenuous, fellow at the Hoover Institute/member of the Stanford Community or not.