Because all laws and bans are tradeoffs. By banning something that doesn't have a significant effect you might be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
How many lives are saved and traumas avoided through people's ability to defend themselves with guns? If that number is higher than the number of toddler accidents, gun ban would effectively cause an increase in PTSD and deaths.
P.S.: just to clarify, by "significant" I mean significant in a statistical sense of not being insignificant (very close to zero, noise-level), not "majority".
That's a fair point. I took the premise to be that there was already a higher trauma rate in the US based on the fact that there is so apparently so much medication given out for trauma related issues compared to other countries. This had been suggested above but I didn't look into it further.
> How many lives are saved and traumas avoided through people's ability to defend themselves with guns
Self defence with guns sounds pretty traumatising for all involved to be fair.
I'm not a psychologist, but intuitively, most trauma seem to have an element of helplessness in them. Being able to defend yourself and your loved ones with guns would therefore cause less trauma than having to wait for police to come, or just being hurt/seeing a loved one
hurt/murdered in front of you.
Still, we're stepping deep into the speculation area here, so I won't stand behind this argument very strongly.
The act of committing violence against another person with a weapon itself is traumatic. Most people can't simply turn off their instinct for empathy and kill another person in cold blood simply because the other is an "enemy," and not suffer psychological consequences, possibly even PTSD. Even police officers, professional killers that they are, have to go through mandatory counseling and assessment after a shooting.
Realistically, your argument isn't to lessen trauma, but to simply normalize it. Which is exactly what American culture already does.
> Realistically, your argument isn't to lessen trauma, but to simply normalize it. Which is exactly what American culture already does
No, actually, my argument is that killing or injuring a person in self-defense is less traumatic than being helpless while getting assaulted.
Besides, trauma is relative - "normalizing" trauma is another way of saying "being desensitised" - which is exactly the process therapy itself employs to help people relieve the effects of it.
There's also different levels of trauma involved in the kind of assault you're likelyt to come up against. Being held up at gunpoint is something I can't imagine happening in my life.
Oddly, I've once had a dream that I was being held at gunpoint.
A person unknown to me was holding a submachine gun, and I could literally feel the muscles tensing in my stomach, where the gun was pointed at, anticipating the pain of a bullet. It was one of the most uncomfortable and frightening things I've felt in my life, so much that I still remember the dream quite vividly.
I assume being held at gunpoint in real life would be even more frightening.
How many lives are saved and traumas avoided through people's ability to defend themselves with guns? If that number is higher than the number of toddler accidents, gun ban would effectively cause an increase in PTSD and deaths.
P.S.: just to clarify, by "significant" I mean significant in a statistical sense of not being insignificant (very close to zero, noise-level), not "majority".