I agree with almost all of your comment. I think as a matter of policy, handguns should be banned or heavily restricted, and if I were in charge of rewriting the US Constitution (which I think is quite shit and a terrible basis for running a modern country), I’d definitely get rid of the second amendment.
You seem to be arguing against what you think a typical American believes, rather than against my actual position.
I’m not arguing that policy shouldn’t be changed. I’m arguing that it’s so difficult or impossible to change, for relatively little benefit compared to other possible reforms, that focusing on it isn’t worth the cost.
The salient difference between the US and other developed democracies is the US’s uniquely broken political structure. What most people don’t understand when comparing the US to Canada or Australia is that the US can’t “just” pass a law making serious and major reforms. It’s simply not possible. In almost every country, when most people agree a law should change, the Parliament just passes it, the head of state agrees to it if necessary, and then that’s it. Not so in the US.
In our naturally gridlocked and fundamentally broken political system, there are only three ways a law can change in a major way at the federal level:
(1) It is obscure enough that nobody cares about it,
(2) It is so widely supported that it can actually get through the deadlock, or,
(3) It doesn’t go through the legislative process at all, but arises from the Supreme Court changing its interpretation of the constitution.
For example: the vast majority of Americans have believed since the 1970s (as far back as my data goes) that abortion should be legal in at least some circumstances. A majority have believed since the early 2010s that gay marriage should be legal. And a solid majority have believed since 2000 (as far back as my data goes, and to be fair it dipped to around half during the Obamacare debates) that the healthcare of all Americans should be the responsibility of the government.
But because of the brokenness of our system, the first two reforms could only be made by the Supreme Court, and we’re still waiting on the third.
We can’t even agree to switch to the metric system, despite practically every educated person agreeing it’s superior.
Given these facts, if you’re going to spend the huge amount of political capital, years of debates to the exclusion of everything else, waiting for once-in-a-generation supermajorities, etc. that were necessary for even a relatively minor reform like Obamacare, you’re better off focusing on something more impactful, like improving transit infrastructure, mitigating climate change, subsidizing poor people’s access to healthy food, or any number of things that will save more lives overall than making mass shootings less likely.