Under the dictatorship of the proletariat firearms would have to be restricted so that reactionaries could not access them. As the transition to communism progressed there would eventually be a point where weapons wouldn’t need to be controlled. Under capitalism gun control, like all laws of the bourgeois dictatorship, will only be used to maintain the supremacy of the bourgeois class.

Not really. I admire the competence of China’s government, and that includes its strict gun control. I think it would be much more unstable if it allowed every political crank and domestic abuser to buy an AK. At the same time, I admire capitalist countries in Europe for having similar policies and also think they would become more dysfunctional if they were gun-obsessed like the US.

Yes.

I don’t want a society with guns as accessible as they are and would happily give them up.

Under AES I fully support strict gun control. I think China has their gun policies pretty on point.

Under capitalism I’m very torn. In particular, in the current day United States the people who want me, my loved ones, and anyone like us dead and buried have lots and lots and lots of guns. So I’d like some of the people who like us being alive to also have guns.

As far as myself personally, I’m not entirely sure if I’m even allowed to own a gun but if I can I don’t want one, I’m painfully aware that the person I’d be most likely to use it on is “me if I get too sad”

I don’t believe people under a capitalist society should be allowed to own guns because the implication is that they asked for and received permission.

I don’t think guns would be a very big deal in the absencse of capitalist incentives for violence, and we could have shooting clubs with secure armories for folks who wanted to shoot for fun.

This is maybe a bit silly to bring up:

My writings about my conworld mainly focus on a federation whose only land border — a very long land border indeed — is with its former colonial master. This colonial empire has required that the decolonized federation must not enforce border controls, must have the imperial metropole’s monarch as co-head-of-state alongside three indigenous heads-of-state, must tie citizenship and consular services to those of the imperial metropole and the three indigenous confederations, and must allow the empire’s military to do exercises and build bases on the federation’s soil within a “zone of permitted presence” to the west of a tall mountain range. The empire notably has also refused to give up some large stretches of strategically important bits of traditional land of several of the indigenous peoples of the federation — bits of land that could be used for an eventual amphibious invasion of the federation. And obviously the decolonized federation largely inherited its legal system from the empire, and the empire is still very firmly tied to the economy of the decolonized federation, and uses this economic leverage to try to stop the spread of class consciousness and revolutionary spirit.

In the situation of this “unfinished revolution”, the socialist faction of the anti-colonial movement had an interest in ensuring the right to bear arms, because obviously allowing socialists to arm themselves is beneficial for the revolutionary struggle for reasons you should already be well familiar with. But even the non-socialist faction of the anti-colonial movement understood that the young federation’s armed forces would consist of one fleet and one field army of the empire’s, where natives were segregated from settlers and relegated to low-ranking positions, and where a large number of the high-ranking officers were already transferring to other parts of the empire’s military for fear of how they might be treated by a decolonized state. It was paramount for the young federation’s survival to racially integrate its armed forces, to equalize the settlers and natives, to make up for the losses in manpower and strategists, to have natives heavily outnumber settlers, to prevent the development of the armed forces into a distinct group identity with collaborationist interests, to develop heavy industry and combat homelessness and separatism, and to build up the military might to even stand a remote chance of withstanding an invasion.

The way this ended up being solved was by transferring soldiers between formations en masse, reorganizing the armed forces into a highly horizontal and democratic and even informal institution, allowing for non-government militias as well as regional defense forces, cooperating with the armed forces of nearby decolonized states, and instituting incredibly widespread conscription in the form of a militia system, where the federal armed forces do not consist of regular and professional soldiers but rather consist of volunteers and conscripts. Anyone who’s served in the federal armed forces gets to keep sy firearms at home, in fact for conscripts one’s “weapon of passage” is often seen as a trophy of adulthood. Likewise firearms (including parts kits) are easy to purchase and gun clubs are readily available across the federation. The federation’s aim is quite simply to give as many people firearms and training and some form of organization as possible, on top of having a truly ridiculous number of bunkers (many of them disguised as regular buildings) and lots of bits of critical infrastructure rigged with explosives à la Switzerland. Because as Vietnam proves, no amount of imperial superiority can withstand the masses engaging in guerrilla warfare.

However, while this gun policy did succeed in its aims (no pun intended), it also caused many other problems. Because you obviously don’t just have socialists arming themselves, but you also have plenty of reactionary thugs, including settler militias; and you also have increasing gun violence, including ethnic conflict between settlers and natives; and you also have seized or discarded or sold weapons getting into the hands of the police, who were largely disarmed upon independence but who are obviously now using their newer toys to oppress the working class and increasingly become that cohesive collaborationist reactionary segment of society that the young federation ensured the armed forces would not become. Some of the regional defense forces can be at times troublesome as well. So all in all the gun culture of the decolonized federation, the cultural binding of national identity to bearing arms, has resulted in some amount of exploitable societal and political instability, for as much as it has also helped protect independence and develop the revolutionary struggle.

Within a local commune there might very well be agreements to e.g. access firearms and other weapons only communally. That’s cool, when things are truly run horizontally. I might or might not choose to be a part of such a commune (but IMO it’s a pretty inviting possibility).

My answer regarding state control of weapons of any sort will always, always, ALWAYS be the same: FUCK OFF!