For future reference, you should hyphenate the phrase. "People-murdering-machines" wouldn't have been confusing. In fact, using either "gun" or "firearm" would be more effective but I understand that you're trying to evoke your idea with raw emotion.
Guns (or "people-murdering-machines") are used far more often for target shooting and hunting than they are used to commit murder.
That's just a cold hard fact. The vast VAST majority of gun owners will never fire their weapon at another human being. Also a fact.
So, the issue comes down to the "potential" to kill, or in your argument, the specific design to be able to kill.
I don't know what to tell you in that regard. I'm not comfortable with the police or state or federal government tracking my personal purchases. Gun crimes have been declining for nearly 30 years, despite gun ownership skyrocketing. There is no correlation between ownership and violent crime that I have seen.
There is a need to acknowledge that guns are primarily for murdering people, again setting aside hunting. It is not relevant that they are not mostly used in murders. That argument reduces to absurdity when you consider that by the same reasoning, nuclear weapons are for making people nervous, fire extinguishers are wall decorations, and rape whistles are just unattractive necklaces. The very reason to be is the killing bit. A "reason to be" is a stronger statement than something happening to have a certain potential. Not just the "specific design to be able to kill," but in fact they're precisely for killing people.
One of the most morally perfect statements we can make concerning guns is that we have a right to know who is shooting and killing people. The only way to do that to a reasonable degree is to account for guns. It's unassailable. So that has to be accepted when we argue this. It shouldn't be ignored, and it can't be rationalized away, only justified.
As you can imagine, I'm very familiar with the lines of justification. You mentioned a couple, one of which is that you're nervous about our surveillance of each other via the executive arm of the democratic government. The other that *certain forms* (I had to add this part) of gun ownership are not correlated with violent crime, which I reject pretty quickly because first of all, literally every gun-adjacent crime is correlated perfectly with gun ownership, and second, because essentially every illicitly-possessed gun used to be in the god-fearing hands of a "
perfectly responsible law-abiding citizen." We've got lots of those. America is just lousy with them.
I have a complicated relationship with the morality of guns and I see it from a lot of viewpoints. I can't even say where I stand on the issue because that depends on what is being emphasized. Even if I'm just looking at it from the perspective of three things: personal feelings, game theory, and societal outlook, each produce wildly different positions and are not always internally consistent. That's without getting into the Constitution at all, which is its own ball of worms.
Considering all that, it would be very dishonest of me to dismiss the moral goodness of the position that we should be able to know who is doing the shooting and where the guns came from. Another thing to reject at our own peril is the argument from pacifism. Those are valuable points of view that must be a part of a pro-gun position. The supercession of that moral good must be accounted for, rather than foolishly dismissed.
