system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Why are so many Americans against gun control?

I understand is a constitutional right, and that having a gun means freedom and freedom to protect what's yours. I'm aware of the historical tradition of gun ownership in the US. I suppose these are all reasons in one way or another.

But, I don't understand the mentality that MORE guns and easier access for everybody to guns make things safer, or that there is a real need for assault rifles high-capacity magazines in everyday life. Why are some people – the public and politicians – so passionately in favor of something that is obviously killing far too many innocent people. 

What am I missing?
gpt
The part most people don't understand about the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is that it wasn't written to protect people from criminals or to ensure people could hunt for food with guns. You have to understand what the people who wrote the Constitution had just gone through - a big war, against one of the strongest armies (maybe **the** strongest army) in the world. If they hadn't been as well armed as they were, they would not have been able to beat England's soldiers, and America would still be a colony of England today.

The Second Amendment says, "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." The problem many people have now is that the words we use have changed in their meaning over the last two hundred years or so. I'll explain what each of those parts originally meant.

* "A well regulated Militia..."

Well regulated, at the time, meant something like "well equipped," or in this case "well armed". A militia is a group of regular people, not professional soldiers, who get together to help fight a war. Usually they didn't even become a militia until after the war had already started.

* "...being necessary to the security of a free State..."

Here, they are saying that that well equipped groups of regular people are necessary to keep a country free. Security in this case means "keeping something," not like "security guard". 

* "...the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

This was originally meant to say that the government could not make any laws about what sorts of weapons people could own. If you wanted to buy a little knife, you could. If you wanted to buy your own battleship, you could. This was to make sure the people of the United States would be able to defend themselves from a dangerous or evil government, not just from bears or robbers. That lasted about 150 years, until people forgot what the Second Amendment was for and started passing laws against guns in Congress to try to take guns away from dangerous criminals.

Most people who don't believe guns should be regulated see it like this: The first amendment protects free speech, with the only real limits being when you use your right to free speech to harm other people. Most people would agree that it's very important to protect your right to speak freely, because it's important to be able to tell the world when something bad is happening in your country. The same thing could be used for the second amendment - the only limits to having guns would be if you use them to hurt other people. Instead, people who want gun control are trying to take away guns in the hope it will keep people safer. 

The part that people disagree on is whether the guns themselves are a cause of bad things happening. People who don't like guns think that taking them away will stop people from doing bad things, like shooting other people. People who like guns think that taking guns away will make even worse things possible, like strong boys beating up weak girls, or bad governments making us give up freedoms that are important to us (like free speech).