system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV: Americans having easy access to guns is a bad thing.

Okay, first of all, I am not from the USA, I am from Europe. I live in a country where there are really strict rules on who can own a gun. Mainly hunters, security personnel, and the sort. Who actually need it. In order to get a gun you have to talk to psychologists and go through a lot of tests.

I am 22, and I have only once seen a gun in my life, on a soldier. If a shooting happens in my country, it makes the news, even if nobody was killed or hurt, because that sort of thing is really rare. I can only think of one incident that happened close to me, and that was with an airgun, which has less strict rules. The giy who commited the crime was mentally ill. Noone was seriously hurt. 

So my thinking is, any american who says we need guns to defend ourselves etc, is really stupid. If your country didnt sell ammo in grocery stores, then you wouldnt have to have a gun to defend yourself. I can not think of a single time I wished I had a gun. I dont think any of the people who I know would have benefited from having access to guns in any point of their life either. 

I dont mean to offend anyone by this post, I really want to know why a lot of americans think that taking everyones guns and placing more strict rules would be a bad thing and wouldnt bwnefit future generations. Why woukd that be a bad thing?
gpt
> Why woukd that be a bad thing?

I’m not sure people outside the US really get the cultural basis for the US obsession with guns.

At the end of the day: the US was built and predicated on the idea that the government should be held hostage at gunpoint by the people it governed. It’s a very old conception for a representative democracy—one rooted in the fact that the US itself originated from a violent insurgent revolution against monarchy. It’s the OG of modern revolutionary states. 

But one consequence of that is a profound cultural acceptance of the idea of a well armed citizenry. Because for the first hundred years of its creation, *an armed citizenry was actually necessary for the security of the state*. The US is a very culturally paranoid country in large part for good reason—it was a violently anti-monarchist revolutionary state that was a small fish in a very large pond for most of its foundational history. That’s why it was so paranoid about European expansion into the western hemisphere (to the point that it declared it would go to war with any European power that tried to expand its influence in *the entire half of the globe the US resided within*). That’s also why it’s so paranoid about disarming the population internally—it’s viewed as a huge step towards a tyrannical authoritarian state by a government that is flagrantly violating its agreed upon boundaries.

This cultural practice is a bad fit for the modern era, where the US has near total military dominance in its entire half of the world with a professional military that could and would absolutely crush some sort of militia uprising. But culture changes slowly, and it changes especially slowly in the US when it concerns a fundamental human right written into its founding constitution. 

For Americans the right to bear arms *even against the government* is a human right on the same level as the right to freedom of expression, or the right to due process. Changing this is very hard. You’re effectively asking people to voluntarily give up a right they consider sacred and fundamental to all human beings.