This topic is making another round, so here is my two sense (not cents on purpose, OP) in about 900 words.
One inalienable right not listed in the Declaration of Independence, is the right to defend your life, liberty, and ... property. (Pursuit of happiness is a little etheric for this post.) By inalienable, I mean to say that it is not something that can be sold nor ownership thereof transferred and should not be forcibly taken. Government is inherently at odds with all inalienable rights. It is a fundamental conflict implied by the words govern and liberty.
For example, governments need funding. Hence taxes and a conflict with property as they claim your resources. A conflict with liberty as they don't give you a choice. And a conflict with the right to defend them in that they cannot tolerate you not paying. But this isn't an analysis of rights and governments, this is about gun control.
You have the right to defend yourself, your property and your loved ones. Nobody can take that right away from you. Further, nobody can do it for you, and the government really can't do it for you. Imagine that somebody breaks into your house. What do you do? Do you call 911? Even back when they took 911 calls seriously it still took several minutes for the police to arrive. When I was a little kid, maybe 10 years old, a guy broke into our house through the back door while Dad was at work, Mom was doing dishes with my older brother, and my little sister and I were watching TV together. In about 3 seconds Mom got his attention and I grabbed the cordless phone and disappeared into the house calling 911. Fortunately, the intruder's real goal was to intimidate us ... which didn't work too well. But it took 30 minutes for the Police to arrive and fill out a report. If he had decided to hurt us, (which he might have if he had better control of the situation and my brother wasn't bigger than him and standing next to the knives), the whole scene would have still played out before the police arrived. If the same thing happened today, it would likely take a half hour to get through to 911 like it did about a year ago when we had a medical emergency in my home.
I don't blame the government or the police for their slow response time in either case. They cannot protect and provide for us. They cannot be everywhere all the time, and even if they could then they still wouldn't be able to do the job. Besides, we wouldn't want them every where all the time.
To try to abdicate our right to defend ourselves or responsibility to defend our loved ones is to surrender a key part of who we are. It is fundamental in our psyche to strive. If we do not strive we do not thrive. The only question is what tools we should have at our disposal for self defense?
Every society, has to draw the line somewhere. We have to decide what tools are rightful for individuals to have at their disposal for their defense. This is our decision to make collectively as citizens, not a decision for a 'government'. There are some things that are simply not in the realm of defense ... they fall in the category I would like to call immoral weapons. Think weaponized small pox and nuclear bombs. I don't know anybody who is arguing for unrestricted access to these items. The big issue with these is that there is no real way to limit bystander casualties.
The capacity to control damage is the key to determining whether or not a weapon should be controlled by the government or not. A semi-automatic any-gun is relatively easy to use and control damage. It is fully at the discretion of the shooter to pick a target and pull the trigger. The person with the gun has to make a bullet by bullet decision about what they want to do. This makes it a moral weapon.
Further, the gun is ubiquitous. No amount of regulation or government effort would be able to remove all the guns from society. And further, they are relatively easy to make. I have access to all the resources necessary to manufacture a gun completely off the books. I even have the knowledge necessary to figure it out, and I think there are a few hundred people living in the same valley that could do it better. The same tools that are used to fix a car or make a table leg can be used to manufacture a gun. You cannot have the capacity to make or repair machines without the capacity make or repair guns. It is up to the individual what they want.
Since a gun is a moral weapon useful for our inalienable right to defend us and ours, and since we cannot by action or will of government remove guns from our lives: guns should have virtually NO legal restrictions. The only restrictions that a government can rightfully or realistically put on guns is for individuals that have demonstrated they have issues with sanity, morality, or law. We have given our government the tools of imprisonment and restraining orders. We have established the precedent of registries for offenders of the law. Government can use these tools to regulate access to guns by those few whom we deem fundamentally irresponsible or immoral.
