I doubt that anyone has any serious issue with the right to possess a gun to defend one's person, family and property.
Wrong. Your liberal fellows want guns gone.
The objection is to 450 million guns, unregistered and transferred in undocumented private transactions from the backs of trucks
Which you can do NOTHING to control at all.
and high-powered rifles in the hands of children and the unstable.
You do realize that most country kids bag their first deer somewhere around puberty, right? With rifles far more powerful than those little peashooters you are so clenched about, right?
And it is already illegal for the unstable to own firearms in most places. How exactly is that working out?
There IS a problem with gun culture in this nation, and it has little to do with protecting the "right to self-preservation". The problem is unending violence, made deadly because of guns
You are concatenating gun culture (which is good), with crime culture. CRIME is the problem, and the violence that it breeds.
and all of us, gun owners and non-gun owners alike, need to put aside our prejudices and our selfishness and work toward a solution
Selfishness my ass. Guns are not a problem here. If they are a problem where you are, then write your damn laws for your location and see what from there. Funny, ain't it, that where gun laws are the most strict, that's also where crime and violence bloom. One way or another, your rarified back-east big city views are not qualified in the least to impose your impractical notions upon anything other than back-east big cities, where they have all been tried, and already found to bear no fruit, but more violence, and more strictures on citizens.
- perhaps something along the lines of Switzerland, a nation with a healthy gun culture but one that requires both licensure and registration and the documented transfer of all firearms.
LOL! Switzerland is 15k square miles and 8m people. That's a couple metropolises here. What you propose is not manageable in those large cities, not to mention nation wide.
Piss on your laws.When you start finally addressing the actual problem - CRIME- Enforcing harsh sentencing, to include capital punishment against violent wrongdoers, when you stop coddling criminals and patrol ghettos, THEN, your problem will go away.