The biggest problem about US gun laws is that they are written in an extremely "all-or-nothing" fashion. There are a bunch of European countries where you can o

The biggest problem about US gun laws is that they are written in an extremely "all-or-nothing" fashion. There are a bunch of European countries where you can own modern semi-auto rifles and handguns privately, and they don't have the homicide/suicide rates of the US. The thing is that almost every other country in the world handles private firearms ownership through a combination of: 1. Categorizing firearms on objective criteria, and grouping weapons on what is essentially a risk basis. So manual-action rifles and shotguns might be category A, semi-auto long guns with fixed magazines and revolvers might be category B, semi-auto weapons with detachable magazines might be category C, and so on. 2. Having a tiered licensing system that gates private access to firearms based on which category they fall into. In a fair number of European countries, the basic firearms license is obtainable basically as long as you're an adult citizen without a criminal history who can pass a basic psychological evaluation. The categories and licenses actually vary a ton between countries. Some are quite permissive (e.g. Czechia, Switzerland) and some are very restrictive (e.g Romania). In the US it's totally different. There is no license for owning a firearm, there is simply legal eligibility (are you an adult, not a drug addict, not a felon, not convicted of domestic violence, etc). As a US citizen, owning firearms operates on a sort of "benefit of the doubt" system where you have the right to own them by default. That's basically the opposite of every other country. Also, under federal law there is no legal difference between a single-shot .22 and an AR15. The only category based restriction is that handguns can't be sold to under-21s. The only weapons which are meaninfully treated differently are machine guns, "destructive devices" (explosives, launchers, and certain shotguns for some reason), silencers/suppressors, and "short-barreled" rifles & shotguns (defined as having a barrel length under 16 or 18 inches respectively). The thing is, that even these special categories of firearms do not have any advanced legal requirements for ownership beyond those of normal firearms, but they have to be registered and require additional paperwork and processing time to transfer ownership. On the state level, there are some laws that introduce a license system, some laws that try to restrict certain categories of firearms or magazines, and other things of that nature. There doesn't seem to be much evidence that state-level gun laws are very effective in reducing gun crime. But across the US you have states with every combination of high/low crime and lax/permissive gun laws. It seems like any meaningful change will have to take place on the federal level. I think the best thing the US could do for everyone is move to a tiered-license system for all firearms. As a part of this, we could get rid of the arbitrary NFA classifications which might help bring support from the pro-gun side. I think this is ultimately wishful thinking however, because I don't think this kind of system would be allowed under the current interpretation of the 2nd amendment.