@Investigator,
Quote:The kid just as easily could have taken a knife or club to his father if he didn't have access to a gun.
Hmm...it might have been easy to grab a knife or a club but it wouldn't have been as easy to inflict a fatal wound. That's why modern armies replaced primitive weapons with firearms. In the USA between 2018 and 2025, approximately 78% of homicides were committed with firearms, while only about 8% involved knives. FBI crime statistics show that 662 homicides in 2020 were committed with personal weapons, described as "hands, fists, feet, etc." Clubs and blunt objects are about half that rate.
Again, it's not so much the lethality of the weapon as it is the
ease of inflicting a fatal wound from a distance. Restricting civilian gun ownership to manual reloading rifles (as opposed to semi-automatics) would probably decrease the number of gun fatalities but, ironically, could result in more people being bludgeoned to death by long guns as USAmericans seem to have lots of reasons to wish to kill each other.