(points to username)
Part of the reason the Second Amendment exists is because as a new country that had just fought a war to free ourselves from oppression, we were aware that sometimes tyranny exists and people need to physically protect themselves from it. Later world history bears this out - keep in mind that years before the Nazis were sending Jews to concentration camps, they were taking weapons away from Jewish gun owners and made it illegal for Jews to buy guns. I find it interesting that so many people say Trump is a fascist, yet still want American citizens to no longer have guns. You want an allegedly fascist government to be the only people with guns?!
People saying that “mentally ill people shouldn’t be allowed to buy guns” haven’t thought it out. My cousin has bipolar disorder. For several years, she was stalked by her ex-boyfriend, who beat her during their relationship and was threatening her life. If she’d wanted to buy a gun to defend herself from him, I wouldn’t have wanted her to be denied that ability. It’s realistic to deny someone a gun permit if they have a history of criminal violence, but disallowing mentally ill people to buy guns would leave up to twenty percent of the American populace more or less defenseless against criminals with guns.
Then there’s the practicalities. Who would take all the guns? What gives them that right to take them? Do we think that criminals are going to nicely surrender their weapons like the law-abiding people would? Some people are ex-military - you’re going to tell them that the US government used to trust them with a gun when it was in the US government’s interests, but now that they want one for self-defense, they can’t be trusted to have one?
I think that if guns disappeared tomorrow, people who wanted to create political violence and mass attacks would start bombing things instead. (Columbine, for example, was supposed to be largely a bombing attack with the killers also shooting people, but Klebold and Harris’s bombs failed to detonate.)