Most of this ends up a gross oversimplification using assumption, sweeping strokes of the pen, and trite tautological truisms. Whatever you'd like to call what this will be, it's not necessarily deep but it just might be insightful a bit at times. We'll largely go with extremes and with absolutes, in a vague sort of generalized way. Try and keep it low on the buzz words and catch phrases and personal anecdotal examples that don't really mean much. That is, follow along with the point, and we might just make it through.
There are two groups, which the names of just might say it all. We have anti-gun. We have pro-gun.
For guns and against guns. Really. How spectacularly uninformative pro-gun and anti-gun are on the surface. For hammers, against swords, no comment on dynamite or chainsaws or ice cream. Our pro and anti terms have nothing much showing up top but what the reader makes out of them.
Deep within, yes, much is there. Roll the imagery around in your head. Consider the explanatory power of the two terms, think of the meaning of what the words actually mean, and the mental pictures and feelings the terms bring up for you. What do pro-gun and anti-gun make you think of? What do you think they make other people think of? Have you considered the other viewpoint, or do you deny there is one. Do you ignore that other people just don't agree with you. Are you unaware that some might decide to use force to make their point.
If you aren't fully shoved and squished against one side or the other already, what do you get out of considering both of those -gun terms. Consider them with at least some measure of free-will, at least somewhat out of a total immersion within perception and preconception and bias. What's there for you in pro-gun and anti-gun, is it those who 'are for the wholesale slaughter of innocents' versus those who 'wish to be at the whim and mercy of the elite and powerful'? Or is it something else, in the middle or towards the ends? Or can you only see one or the other, and naught else but that side?
One way to put it is that the anti- side believes and feels and knows that all weapons, especially and even more so guns, are evil. They have no use but to kill. They are for war, for aggression, for all that is bad and base and animalistic about humans. Guns have no real function, they are an abomination that if only they were gone, things would be peaceful, nice, calm and thus open for humanity to reach its full potential. Nobody needs guns, and nobody should have guns. Guns in and of themselves are bad, 100%, make no mistake. Knives and bows and baseball bats and rebar in the hands of a single person can't slaughter dozens of innocents in minutes; but a girl with a .22 pistol and a backpack of loaded magazines can do so.
One way to put it is that the pro- side believes and feels and knows that all weapons, including but not limited to guns, are simply inert inanimate objects. Tools to be used. Their primary use is whatever the owner needs it for, but largely the items put power and control in the hands of the individual. They are for collecting, for enjoying the firing of, for defense, for survival food and otherwise. One of their uses is against those who would misuse them. Guns have a history going back some thousand years and are a part of humanity that could no more be erased than could moveable type, toothpaste, soap, clocks, paper money or spectacles. Guns are not inherently good or bad. People were killing each other for thousands of years before gunpowder was invented by the Chinese around 700 to 850. After that, it was only that who was holding which end of the stick; it depended not upon guns themselves, but on who had more and better of them, what sort of people they were, and under what circumstances.
How easily then might the debate be expressed? Simply perhaps. We might say, the sides hate each other. They each think the other is as nuanced and understanding as a backwards-facing timing-retarded chimpanzee-giraffe DNA-splice wearing a blindfold and earplugs is at building a fusion reactor from pie plates and some rocks that might have some uranium isotopes in them. Others might say "Of course, that is how things are." After all, these groups have opposite viewpoints stemming from vastly different places of understanding, conception and perception. Both are both filled with emotion and extremely unlikely to ever listen to each other, much less agree. That is somewhat how "the debate" is in many ways phrased, stated and understood, albeit not exactly or directly obviously. In the end, just as with a lot of things, in various ways all of the ways to describe "the other side" might even be somewhat true. That there are sides in a matter of opinion, what of that.
Which all seems a rabbit hole of no return to discuss. How about just making it one question to answer then: Who is correct, the anti-gun or the pro-gun? Perhaps to some extent, they both are. Both of them, even beyond one simplest part of all. That within their group, alone, on its own, they are fully correct.
Once you bring it out in public, trying to make the two mesh, that's where the troubles are, that's where the complexity lives and breathes.
Essentially then, simplistically, this all boils down to evil versus neutral. To deeply felt emotions and unexplainable nuances of personal knowledge, opinion as fact, subjectivity as truth. How then do you take the two groups and find common ground as far away from the extremes as the extremes are from each other? Maybe you don't. Perhaps you can't. For this isn't a matter of objective fact and clear-cut logic. It's not a discussion of when water boils or when snow melts, it's not a statement that water is the critical part of all components of the climate short of sunlight itself. No, this is a matter of personal and group certainty arising from vastly different and incompatible viewpoints. You might as well try and get a lion and a gazelle to agree on what movie to watch, or get God and Satan to agree who will be in charge of catering the Bat Mitzvah.
One argument might go like this. Logically, there is little difference between a child dying from the accidental discharge of a pistol and a child dying from drowning in the pool. Logically, there is no difference between being repeatedly shot by an ATEC-11.5 by gangsters and being hacked to bits by a machete by a rival tribe. Yet emotionally, there is a novillion lifetimes of light-years between these things, even though we could statistically identify any one thing as being more likely than any other. Most people don't sit around and consider that on the scale of possibility planet-wide, pools are far more dangerous than machete-wielding gangs, and unsafely stored pistols are far more dangerous than gangsters. On an individual basis, none of that holds any water, it's unimportant when dealing with specific cases in specific places.
In a related matter, some might be tempted to make some sort of comparison between the US and other countries, be they as close (in distance) as Canada and Mexico or as unlike the US as any of Germany, Japan, Italy, Rwanda, Darfur, United Arab Emirates, The Kingdom of the Netherlands, Principality of Liechtenstein and Vatican City are, each in their own ways on any given subject. There is a corollary of sorts there, but no direct comparison, no more than we can directly compare the South Side of Chicago Illinois to Butte Montana to Los Angeles California to Nogales Arizona. Comparison-wise, there isn't much of one.
(For those tempted to make some sense out of that subject, how about an article from Asia-Pacific Law Review from about twenty years ago Although it is another subject, and one with hardly any applicability here except as an example of some of the factors to consider if you were to attempt such a thing yourself.)
Such matters do in a way lead into other things, more complicated matters. How then about the source of feelings in some environment and context that is linked into the rest of society and habitat on a particular subject. That is, if to the pro- side guns are neutral (but overall in total, good) and to the anti- side guns are bad (and always bad no matter what) then where do those feelings come from? The "why" and "how" and such of it. That appears to also require some broad generalizations and stereotyping for the purposes of discussion and classification. To a casual observer who might be noticing some generic large-scale trends, then, how might the sides be described, inexactly and too broadly though they be described.
Anti-gun people often are often in high concentration in large cities with high population density. Many people in a small area. These places are urban, with many strangers of various types around, with social attitudes that often tend to make people distrust strangers and form into tightly-knit groups of very similar people. These people might distrust authorities but also rely upon them for protection from others. There seems to also largely be two things about these places themselves. First, there are many strict gun laws on who can possess guns, and there are some meaningful number of less than socially-integrated others who are not in the majority who totally ignore those laws. Second, most people there in that place have no cultural ties to guns (or at least what they do have is negative) and have little to no (casual, friendly, happy) experience with guns or (usual, ordinary, legal) ownership of guns. The people often have never been in the military or in peace-keeping themselves. In large part for those living there, what they know about guns is from the negative personally and from television, movies and news stories about guns. They would never step into a building having a gun show, if there was even such a thing going on anywhere near where they lived. Since as they well are aware that gun shows are only places where criminals can freely buy unregistered unlicensed human-murdering devices.
There are many exceptions of all sorts of course in this anti-gun overgeneralization; such as those who might otherwise be in the pro- group but have had experiences that have put them in the anti- group, people living in smaller areas that socially are more free-spirited, open-minded, artistic and open to diversity that culturally would tend to be interwoven to where guns "wouldn't fit", people growing up anywhere in households that are anti-, and so on.
Pro-gun people often are from places where the population density is light. Few people in a large area. Houses often have their doors unlocked, apartment complexes are the exception, people know one another and there are few unknowns. The authorities are fewer, personally known, and large obvious parts of the community. These people have grown up with guns, know what they can and can't do, and they might as well be hammers or garden hoses. These people by and large hunt and fish, have military or peace-keeping experience or close friends. They know what a 30 round magazine and barrel shroud are and how dangerous they are in and of themselves, and they know how atypical and skewed movies and television and news stories are on the subject . To them, gun shows are an interesting place to talk with friends, hang out with like-minded people, look over the merchandise and perhaps spot a bargain or a rare and unique item.
There are many exceptions of all sorts of course, sometimes for even the same reasons you'd find exceptions to the rule on the anti-gun side. Where the context, where the environment and upbringing and so on, are cause to be in the anti-group. Where experiences have overridden the forces that would lead one to be in the pro- group.
The only thing these two groups share is their absolute certainty that they have things correctly, that they are in the right, that they understand how things really are. Well, of course they do!
The reality of the situation is that by and large, except for the pressures of society (or even in spite of them) humans are only just another kind of animal. Bipedal mammalians. Greedy selfish emotional intelligent social animals, in general more concerned with survival than with anything else. Capable of performing and rationalizing great evil in both thought and deed. It is only socialization, and mores, and the group dynamic that controls us. There are many methods, and many reasons, and that's all another subject. The point being that as long as tools exist, whatever they are, they will be used and they will be misused. Regardless if that's a rock used to beat Abel, the extract of Nightshade used to liquidate a potential romantic rival, or long knives used to forcefully remove Caesar from power. Which doesn't answer any of the questions of what do to about gun violence in the US, or give clear guidance about who is correct in the gun control debate, but it just might lead a thought process to answer some questions or disprove some ideas and desires.
At the end of the road, a country and a society functions on such things as expectations, and family and societal pressures. On mores and rules and laws and contracts, on religion or lack thereof, on education and environment. Who your friends are, who your enemies are. Where you live, work and play. Some people don't have that, some people don't care about you or want what you have. Some people are dangerous and violent, for whatever reason.
Perhaps the experiences of Susanna Gratia in 1991 at Luby's Cafeteria mean something, have some lesson in them. Perhaps they don't. Maybe that most recent mass shootings happen in Gun Free Zones (for everyone but the shooter) means something, and maybe it doesn't. The impact of single parent households, the dissolution of the safety net, the wane of religion, the rise of alternative relationships, a deadening of the Internet generation and violent video games, climate change, solar flares, the number of people in prison and their demographics..... What has a bearing upon all this, and what doesn't. Where's the cause and where's the effect, where is the correlation to the causation. We're not trying to answer those things. There might not even be an answer there, sadly enough.
It's just like the gun control debate itself though. It's simple. People have very different ideas about it all, and very few actually think deeply, fully and logically about it. They just go with what they feel, but feelings don't solve problems. So at the simple, some people are pro-gun and some people are anti-gun. And never the twain shall meet.
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