[abeyer]

> Not even being ironic. I don't understand the point

Because there is a significant part of the country that would love to ban guns completely but they currently don't, and perhaps won't ever, have quite enough support to make a change to the constitution to allow them to. In the absence of that, and given they do have plenty of support to create local law many places, the strategy seems to have become to create a regulatory regime that technically still allows guns while making it as impractical as possible for anyone to actually do so.

[Ylpertnodi]

> Because there is a significant part of the country that would love to ban guns completely but they currently don't, and perhaps won't ever, have quite enough support to make a change to the constitution to allow them to.

Ban guns, or regulate them, and their owners?

[abeyer]

> Ban guns, or regulate them, and their owners?

Both, though I don't know the breakdown. I'm confident saying there's absolutely some people who seem to see onerous regulation as a path to a de facto ban, though.

I'd be more inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to those pushing regulations if the regulations themselves seemed well thought out and drafted rather than leaning on kneejerk "guns bad, rules good" reactions from voters to get passed. Unfortunately the actual situation seems to be that left-leaning areas where it's easy to push anti-gun law lean farther and farther into restricting both first and second amendment rights without meaningful impact, while the right-leaning areas that actually could use some additional regulation over the perhaps overly lax federal level laws can't or won't do anything.