Disclaimer: I don't own a gun.
To be safer I agree that all 50 states and local jurisdictions within should follow Hawaii's example or another like it. Require a permit to purchase any firearm. And to get one means to have to pass a strict background check including mental health workup, criminal past, and other red flag issues.
What's the point of the permit then?
The "strict background check" is already done before any legal firearm purchase. That's what NICS checks are.
The typical argument I see against a federal permit system is that it's a registry. Turns out people, including current and retired cops and military, don't like having their names, addresses, and what they own published out in newspapers for anyone looking to do some midnight shopping. Which happened in my hometown due to a reporter with an axe to grind. We, uh, no longer require permits.
This would not violate the 2nd amendment. It would simply ensure that people aren't able to just randomly go and get armed without any authority figure noticing.
Assuming you're doing so legally, that's already true, though. The NICS check is ran by the FBI, they know the name of every person looking to buy a gun when it's checked against their database.
*shrugs*
Don't get me wrong, a discussion of "How can the NICS be improved" is one worth having, but it helps knowing what's already there so one isn't just recommending things that have already been in place for several decades.
We could even look at gun limits themselves. Why does 1 person need 10 assault rifles and 10 thousand rounds of ammunition? Short answer, they don't lol.
The current legal response to that, I believe, is "So what?". Similarly, one probably doesn't need 15 crates of Heinz ketchup nor 10 thousand beanie babies, but that's independent of whether or not you can legally have them.
The Courts have historically held a particularly dim view on attempts to circumvent constitutional rights via backhanded methods like, say, ammunition taxes or voting permits. Like, if you can think of an argument on that train of thought that won't involve you fleeing out of the Supreme Court with a 0-9 vote against you by all means, but people have been trying stuff like that for quite awhile. The Justices haven't been amused.
These seem like fairly common sense issues here. Someone who has a history of violence, perhaps gang-related should not be able to legally purchase a firearm, for example.
They can't. So I suppose that's a weight off you mind?
It's actually rather dangerous to have a gun in your home. Someone you live with may easily use it against you; it's more likely that you'll be killed by someone you know well than someone you don't. By owning a gun, you're actually increasing your chances of getting killed.
Not really? You're assuming here someone is trying to kill you. Much like your own country shows, if someone is actively trying to kill you, you'll die. Australia's gun laws led to an immediate increase in knife-related murders IIRC. The actual rate of murder wasn't effected, just gun-related murder.
If we talk about accidental shootings, I mean, that's just basic gun safety not being followed, same as very simple-non-Darwin-Award concepts like "Don't thrust pointy bit of knife to someone you're handing it to", "Silverware does not belong in electrical outlet", and "Don't text/drink and drive".
And lastly, suicide, much like mass shootings continually show to be, is mental health related. The ever increasing group of mass shooters with a history of actively seeking mental health help (or physical health services, neurologists and the like) and being denied is also distressing. But that opens up a whole different can of worms, both legal and historical, on
how one goes about dealing with that. But that's also definitely a conversation worth having, and is in many ways an identical conversation to the one above about how one could even go about improving the NICS.
If your house is being broken into, just call the police. Pulling a gun on someone with a gun could easily result in a shootout, where you might get killed. Sure, you might kill the other guy, but there's an excellent chance you might die. If you live in the middle of absolutely nowhere, a gun might be useful for self-defence reasons, but most of us don't live in the middle of nowhere.
I mean, that might be true in Australia, but that's...not really true here? Get out of the cities in the US and for huge parts of the countries you're looking at response times on the order of hours, not minutes if we're talking about break-ins or people truly out to murder you in your sleep. And if we switch to burglary, the concept there isn't to get in a firefight, it's to scare them off.
Far more in terms of safety would be animals, though; coyotes, boars, deer, bears, moose, alligators, etc, depending on where in the country your from. US wildlife is basically as bad as meme-Australia's wildlife, basically. And in terms of food, too...then everything else, really. Never really understood the insistence by some people that the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th reason someone may own a gun is because of some crazy paranoia.
The middle of nowhere thing is kind of another big problem with the whole framing of the debate in the US; rural and urban divide, which basically went from not very important to hugely inflamed in the last few years ago. Most gun-related deaths happen in cities, with illegally obtained firearms. Most gun owners are progressively more rural places from a city, with legally obtained firearms. Guns are viewed as magical murder sticks in cities, and why the family isn't going hungry that winter in rural places. Laws are passed on a state (or federal) level, and Capitols are all cities. Stuff like NYC being granted enough autonomy such that they have the capacity to enact their own harsher gun-related laws within the city itself is more the exception than the rule.
Perhaps it is time to enact gun control laws to prevent these deaths.
And that's basically where the devil in the details comes into play. Everyone wants to prevent those deaths, but "Let's pass laws!" is not an actual solution, it's a recommended path one must then travel down. The actual questions that needs to be answered is "Will this law actually prevent these deaths?", with a subquestion to just make sure you haven't been wasting your time to pass a duplicate gun control law because for some reason politicians don't actually bother reading pre-existing legislature before pushing their own.
The answer to this question in the US has generally been a spectrum between "No, not really" to "Are you sure just making things harder for legal gun owners isn't your actual aim?" and "Did you really just classify shoelaces as machine guns?"