Thought I’d offer my belated two cents, a year on. I hope some of the orignal participants in this discussion can respond.
Mentsch1: I cannot see any hashkafic basis for this deterministic view that sensible safety measures are unnecessary since one is anyway destined to die at that time. By this reckoning, putting oneself in any manner of dangerous situations would be completely fine.
On the wider issue of gun ownership – I completely agree that the USA is almost certainly beyond the point of no return when it comes to private gun ownership. Guns are pretty easy to hide, don’t expire, and are pretty much everywhere. There’s no feasible way of changing that. But my question is whether people think that’s largely a positive thing, and that people should be allowed to own weapons due to ideological or practical reasons, or an unfortunate reality?
As a Brit, from a country where guns are rare and gun deaths even rarer, I fail to see why anyone would actively desire a situation like it currently is in the US.