The Supreme Court likes to play games with words and disregards precedent. Expand the court and shove "well-regulated militia" down their throats. Problem solved.

They should give every student a gun at this point (/s because I feel like someone would agree with me).

Edit: everyone should also wear a bulletproof vest at minimum.

Having to think of schools as “soft targets” in a first world country is absolutely wild.

The two statements are not inherently contradictory.

Removing / reducing / "doing something about guns" may well be hard, and it is beyond fascinating to many of us that majority of people / politicians / entities in USA do not want to do it.

In fact, I would say two statements are even complementary - your statement that doing something about guns in usa is hard, is because / as a result of original post that (bewilderingly) most Americans don't want to do it.

(Somehow, turning children schools into dystopian fortresses with metal detectors and armed teachers and security guards and turn stiles and gun drills, pervasive surveillance and trigger-twitchy responses and now drones, is... More freedomy? Liberty, Fuck Yeah? Dunno...)

Interpreting the Second Amendment in a sane way might be a start. Its wording seems clear to me: it establishes the need for a well-regulated militia as necessary to the security of the state, and grants the right to bear arms in that context. No aspect of the current situation is "well-regulated", nor are citizens, apart from a tiny number of fringe groups, organized into militias, and those that are could scarcely be called well-regulated.

I don't have any issue with an armed citizenry for national defense. Look at the Swiss; they are legally required to be armed, but in a highly regulated fashion, exactly so they have a citizen army ready to roll at any time. This seems to me to be what the founders had in mind, not a free-for-all in which guns are available to all in an uncontrolled way.

>The European heat death figures are based on modeled "excess deaths"—a standard epidemiological approach that tries to capture everyone who died earlier than they would have in cooler conditions, including from cardiovascular disease, stroke, and respiratory failure, which casts a wide net. "But the US number," Ritchie wrote, "isn't based on this type of modeling; it's based on heat deaths recorded on death certificates." That's a far narrower count which only captures cases where a physician specifically wrote heat as the cause of death. The result is that the two figures being compared are not measuring the same thing. "If you used death certificate figures for Europe," Ritchie wrote, "they'd be far lower."

Just citing it because some people don't even seem to read the article they just linked.

People don’t evaluate risks based on stats. They do it based on vibes. We do have a disproportionate amount of gun violence for a developed nation but statistically it’s still a very low risk.

I recall pointing this out back during the post 9/11 terror panic. The odds of dying in a terrorist attack were still phenomenally low even after 9/11. It would have taken a relentless stream of constant 9/11 scale attacks to even approach automobile or drug overdose deaths.

I fail to understand why this should make the lack of US action on gun control any more justifiable.

Per your linked article:

> But then comes the adjustment the viral chart skips entirely: when Ritchie controls for population, expressing both figures as rates per 100,000 people, the picture shifts. "Gun deaths in the US are now slightly larger than European heat death rates," she wrote.

> I think this comparison is a bit silly," she wrote, "but sympathize with the overall sentiment." Fewer gun deaths in America would not make European heat deaths acceptable, or vice versa. What the data is actually showing, she argued, is something simpler: status quo bias. "Both places take the status quo as a given"—a high-mortality situation in one domain that each society would never accept in another.