Exactly. This is a situation where you can't just put the genie back in the bottle. We have no method of collecting all the guns out there from law abiding citizens, much less criminals. We have a military that would quite likely defect if told to use their force to collect the guns from citizens. And like I said, a ground war against the gun owning populace of the US would be absurd and effectively impossible.

People from outside the US keep going "well why don't you have better laws?" like we have no gun control laws. We do. They're dumb as hell, based largely on PR and appearance of the guns rather than anything concrete like how many rounds the weapons can sling per second, and are a constant cat and mouse game in our notoriously slow legistlative process as people enjoy finding workarounds for fun.

And as you bring up, so much of the gun violence incidents are caused by people with mental illness having access to firearms, usually through family members not storing them securely.

Better mental health care. Less negative repurcissions for being diagnosed with issues. Mandatory and better gun safety courses. And life changing fines and/or jail time for the gun owner when it is used in a crime (due to not being properly secured).

Yeah yeah, I know: "'No Way to Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens"

There are ways to prevent this, or to significantly reduce it, but this is a complex issue that's been building for at least 250 years. It's not something so simple that the only reason it hasn't happened yet is because people just aren't trying hard enough.

This narrative that all these complex longstanding problems in the world exist because people are too stupid to see the obvious, simple solution or because they aren't trying hard enough is childish as hell. If the world was even remotely that simple, we'd have a very different reality.