> Why is extreme caution and conservatism the order of the day?

Simply put: this was instruction #2 in the BIOS of our country. The people who went to such lengths to gain independence said that allowing an armed populace without government infringement was second only to free speech and religion. This was deliberate.

We've also already had forced confiscations of US citizens during Katrina [5]. We all saw how well that worked out, caused as it was by miscommunication of overlapping agencies despite standing directions not to do so [6].

The reason that caution and conservation are called for is simple: once you allow the government to confiscate firearms, you don't get them back. It's a one-way street, and a street that historically ends with massive oppression of the populace and corruption of law enforcement.

> What history of gun control and political situation are you referring to?

Wikipedia[1] has a quick overview, but the overall theme is continual erosion of the ability of gun owners to possess and maintain relevant firearms. One of the only things preventing this is the continued efforts of the Supreme Court, as seen in cases like District of Colombia v. Heller[2] and the incorporation of same under McDonald v. City of Chicago[3].

As for the political situation, I'll sketch it thusly: do you think that the well-documented issues of police violence would be better or worse (given existing officers) if they knew that the average citizen was unarmed? Do you feel safer under a Trump presidency or somebody worse if the average citizen was unarmed? During the LA Riots, was Koreatown [4] kept safer by having armed citizens?

Using a relevant historical example, in the United States the civil rights movement only really made progress once the Overton window was pulled over by armed extremists and peaceful positions like Dr. King's were seen to be a much more manageable compromise and were made to happen.

> Why do you think this isn't as terrible as it seems to the gun-ignorant?

To be frank: the gun-ignorant typically don't even have the language to understand the danger of firearms in context. Terms like "assault weapon"[9] were created to avoid more accurate (and thus less able to be abused) terms like "assault rifle". Emphasizing "semi-automatic" whenever reporting weapons use, because it sounds kinda like "automatic" and that's scary (even though legally-obtained automatic weapons are basically never used in crimes or shootings--typically instead we see illegal weapons or weapons modified to be automatic). Pointing out "armor-piercing" rounds when that's more a function of caliber and design of round and type of armor, and that being used to limit import and sale of perfectly reasonable (and environmentally friendly!) steel-core rounds.

Then you have stuff like people freaking out about Ghost Guns[10], which are perfectly legal to create and own and frankly which are the same thing people were doing a hundred years ago with lengths of pipe and rubber bands[11]. The thing is, though, that numbers for how many of those improvised and home-manufactured weapons have actually been used are a little hard to come by. But you wouldn't know that from looking at media coverage or from political stump speeches!

The language of gun control has been distorted beyond-belief by both sides[7], and news coverage tends to misidentify weapons badly or to (for example, in Rolling Stone[8]) use such vague phrasing as to paint all firearms as problems.

And yes, these shootings are terrible, but gun violence has been decreasing for quite some time now[12], and as one of this author's colleagues has pointed out[13] there is a lot more at work around gun deaths than a massacre like this would have you imagine.

> What road would increased gun control set us down?

Frankly, I think it'd further our slide into a despotic nation, ruled over by jack-booted thugs and plagued with petty and organized crime. At best, this results in an eventual rebellion and widespread disturbance of the peace and at worst this results in a genuine police state where ubiquitous surveillance and armed police punish and torture citizens for the indefinite future when it suits them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_the_United_States#20th_century
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonald_v._City_of_Chicago
[4] https://en.wikipedia.or /wiki/1992_Los_Angeles_riots#Korean_Americans_during_the_riots
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kf8trl69kzo
[6] https://www.thetrace.org/2015/08/nra-hurricane-katrina-gun-confiscation/
[7] http://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2013/02/26/172882077/loaded-words-how-language-shapes-the-gun-debate
[8] http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/pictures/the-5-most-dangerous-guns-in-america-20140714/revolvers-0375671
[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assault_weapon#History_of_terminology
[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_gun
[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Improvised_firearm
[12] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/12/03/weve-had-a-massive-decline-in-gun-violence-in-the-united-states-heres-why/
[13] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/mass-shootings-are-a-bad-way-to-understand-gun-violence/