> I don't think it's fair that you're getting down votes here without replies.

Why, thank you!

> Currently there are over 30,000 gun deaths in the US every year.

Interesting stat. I'll look into this more and see where the rabbit hole leads me. But as I gather so far, the data supports my claims more than yours. Case in point from Wikipedia:

In 2012, 64% of all gun-related deaths in the U.S. were suicides.

This again points to mental health issues more than guns being the problem. These obviously unwell individuals would have found other ways to exit a world they no longer could bear being in. Sad affair but true. So unless the mental health is addressed, if your goal was to prevent deaths, you would not solve much by taking guns away.

> It is incredibly unlikely that the US government would morph into a murderously tyrannical regime.

Funny that you say that because these same words echo what I heard a holocaust survivor said in a WWII documentary I was watching less than a week ago. The Jews did not think that nazi Germans would ever do what they did to them. They kept saying that Hitler was a passing fad and that in no time (3-4 yrs), he'd be out of power and normalcy would resume. I'd like to think that at the rate with which polarization is happening today, it isn't unfathomable that a murderous regime COULD take power. Even if they weren't murderous, there are other ways to exercise tyranny making death seem a more befitting (or may be even noble) endeavor as opposed to living on one's knees, so to speak.

It never seems dangerous at first. I'd posit that that's why we get insured; we assume that things can be calamitous even when there's little evidence to suggest the same.

That's the difference between my view point and yours. I have a theory on how this ties in to why most preppers are right leaning as opposed to left leaning i.e. perception of risk but I won't get into that right now. The point is, even if there's a small chance of that occurring, because the downside of not being ready is so huge, we must pull all stops to remain safe.

> opposing any restrictions on ownership whatsoever seems an untenable position to me.

I'm glad you see it that way, but a non-trivial number of anti-gun proponents don't see it that way and instead want guns taken away from the bulk of current owners if not all(civilians that is).