Nice rebuttals. I’m surprised you’re hearing the arguments so often that you’re tired of them, though. I don’t hear them that often, myself. Maybe that’s because they’re so easily rebutted, as you have demonstrated.
Here are some others you might want to tackle:
1 It seems intuitively obvious that getting rid of guns will make the world safer, so it makes sense to start where most of them are: in the hands of the politicians and the people who work for them. Mass murders? 50 people at a time is peanuts to politicians. When killing suits their needs, they go for thousands, if not tens or even hundreds of thousands. Suicide bombers in crowded markets? Don’t be silly; politicians drop bombs from airplanes and wipe out whole buildings, if not city blocks. Once the politicians are disarmed it should be an easy sell to get everyone else to turn their swords into plowshares.
In the meantime, it’s not the “gun lobby” that most resists disarming individuals; it’s the people who are uncomfortable about the politicians running roughshod over them … as they are so notorious for doing … once they know the coast is clear. Can you imagine Stalin or Hitler or Idi Amin or Lon Nol or [insert favorite historical tyrant] getting away with what they did in a country where a large percentage of the population was armed? I sure can’t.
What the gun lobby is most concerned about is keeping their biggest customers: the nation-states, so they work hard to keep them shooting and buying more. (Of course “gun lobby” in this context isn’t just about guns, it’s about the whole military-industrial enterprise, including its latter-day incarnation: mass spying.)
2 Go down the list of all the gun atrocities in recent times: Columbine, Sandy Hook, I won’t try to name them all because I’m too lazy to google it and you know the list anyway. Last one is now the Orlando nightclub. What one thing relating to guns do all these places have in common? Answer: they were all “gun-free zones.” Microcosmic examples, in other words, of a nation in which guns are illegal. Putting up a sign, whether literal or virtual, saying “gun free zone” is the same as saying “come and get us, ’cause we can’t stop you.” What a great inspiration to your garden-variety ne’er-do-well!
It’s true that having armed people wandering around isn’t conducive to safety. The more guns being carried around, the more chances of someone using one for stupid or nefarious purposes, no question. But would a zealot/nutcase/terrorist attempt a mass murder in a place where it was likely somebody would shoot back right away? Having an armed population is not a perfect world, but in the imperfect one we’ve got, disarming some people or places while leaving others with access to arms (perhaps even stolen from a government cache, to use your example) seems, on the evidence, to be the lesser of the desirable choices.
It’s a complex issue … much more so than many people are willing to admit. Some arguments perhaps seem “dumb”, to use your description, but as one progresses beyond the straw men, other arguments appear, and thoughtful people may want to consider them also.
