Will, your psychological theories have no basis in research evidence. I don’t know why you think they are worth bringing up in public.
Moving on to the guts of what you are getting at, have you come across Rousseau’s ‘The Social Contract’? It sets out the difficulty you’re embroiled in:
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“”The problem is to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before.” This is the fundamental problem of which the Social Contract provides the solution.”
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The laws about gun control need to be subject to the democratic will of the people, as they are in your country and mine. In my country we decided to give up the right to carry a weapon because we collectively wanted to reduce our chances of being subjected to armed or lethal force by somebody else. I am proud of this, and while I understand that you are scared of criminals with guns, I prefer to think of myself as a citizen who has a contract and duty to my fellow citizens, rather than as a lone individual perpetually under threat.
Rousseau says:
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“Let us draw up the whole account in terms easily commensurable. What man loses by the social contract is his natural liberty and an unlimited right to everything he tries to get and succeeds in getting; what he gains is civil liberty and the proprietorship of all he possesses. If we are to avoid mistake in weighing one against the other, we must clearly distinguish natural liberty, which is bounded only by the strength of the individual, from civil liberty, which is limited by the general will; and possession, which is merely the effect of force or the right of the first occupier, from property, which can be founded only on a positive title.”
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In short, if you think the police are poor, then you need to campaign for a better police force. For pete’s sake, you are American – there is everything to play for. Hardly anywhere gives its citizens more freedom than you have. If you want to take pride in your country, begin by building a police force which upholds justice and the rule of law. And if you refuse to rely on your police force, and if you successfully urge your fellow citizens to act on their own behalf without respect to the law, you will soon find that civic life disintegrates and you ultimately meet a violent end in the lawless world which is currently, thank god, largely a figment of your imagination.
And what I find particularly difficult to stomach about your arguments is that you want to blame people who have died from gun crime for their own deaths. No. You are blaming the victim. The person responsible is the person who pulled that trigger. You are the lawless one.