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No. The Democrats have never sought to ban all guns despite what some people claim. Today, there are many Democrats who own guns themselves. This one is one of them. However, its difficult when the issue is presented as binary between pro-gun and anti-gun as many people would like to present it. I would imagine that there are some who would like to ban all guns but these people are so few in number that they have virtually no chance of breaking into the mainstream. Nor would we want them to. However, what many Democrats think is that the prevalence of firearms is contributing to a more dangerous environment and that something should be done about the more than 30,000 Americans dying due to gun violence every year. So as this is clearly a problem that needs to be broken down, let’s try to have an informed discussion of what most Democrats would like to do to deal with gun violence.When most people think of firearm deaths in the US, they picture the horrifying images from mass shootings such as Columbine High School, Sandy Hook, and recently Las Vegas. In reality however, the vast majority of gun deaths are self-inflicted.Now the solution to this, argued by a tiny number, is to make all guns illegal. But it doesn’t really get at the heart of the problem. Banning all guns to try to prevent suicides would be exactly the same as shutting down all restaurants just because you see a picture of a Taco Bell employee licking the shells.You have failed to deal with the root of the problem, one bad employee, and you have deprived everyone of both a source of food and a popular pastime. Fortunately, there's a far better solution and it goes back to the common adage in the aftermath of every mass shooting: we should be focusing on mental health rather than guns. In this case, it is entirely applicable. Many suicides are committed by people who have hit a dead end in their life and feel that there is no further path forward, leading to depression, and culminating in death. Improving mental health care would enable these people to be diagnosed earlier and improve the chances of them being successfully treated. Knowing this, it seems logical to put more funding in this direction. So, what have we done about that? Well for a start, there are both Medicare and Medicaid which in addition to providing elderly, disabled, and poor Americans with access to healthcare also provide access to psychiatric wards for individuals on either. The recent expansion of Medicaid as called for by the Affordable Care Act would have done much to improve treatment in this area. Rather than becoming a piece of legislation that was universally celebrated by the US, passing the Affordable Care Act became one of the most partisan fights in US political history. In the end, just to pass the senate, the ACA needed a 60 seat majority comprised entirely of Democrats with all forty Republicans voting against. A similar thing happened over in the House where the bill still passed but only with the aid of an overwhelming House Democratic majority, once again facing the opposition of every Republican. But even then, the fight over the ACA continued. Medicaid expansion was left up to the states and after a Supreme Court case determined that states could not be forced to expand Medicaid, this happened.With the exceptions of Maine, Missouri, and Virginia every state that refused to expand Medicaid was at the time under full Republican control and all still had significant Republican influence in government (Maine’s governor was and is a Republican, while Missouri and Virginia had legislatures controlled by Republicans). Now to their credit, several Republican governors including John Kasich of Ohio, Jan Brewer of Arizona, and Rick Snyder of Michigan chose to expand Medicaid with the help of their legislatures, all dominated by Republicans, but in the majority of states with full Republican control, Medicaid expansion was refused, which was disaster for mental health care because the expansion would have put money towards that. Another area where this could be improved is through the states funding mental health care themselves. It should be noted that as of 2014, while 5 of top ten states are completely dominated by Democrats, 8 of the 10 worst states are dominated by Republicans. And this becomes even more apparent when 5 of the top 10 states that spend the most on health care are completely dominated by Democrats while all 10 of the states that spend the least are completely dominated by Republican, including for that matter Texas. Given that states that tend to have a better mental health ranking tend to correlate with states that spend more per patient, I’d say its fairly safe to conclude that spending more helps. From these figures, we can conclude that spending more on mental health care would help decrease gun suicides and lower gun deaths, something that Democrats advocate for, without affecting anyone’s ability to buy one in the first place. Which makes it more than a little on the nose when this guy comes on TV and says the following:Okay, lets do it then2. Now that we have covered the main cause of firearm deaths, let’s move on to the second most common cause of firearm deaths: homicides. Now homicides generally take a couple of forms: violent crime, domestic violence, mass shootings, etc. So for now, let’s tackle the first two mentioned here: violent crime and domestic violence. Now there have been many proposed solutions to both. Currently however, the main attempt has been dissuasion mostly by promising harsh jail sentencing for criminals, followed by virtually making them unable to put their lives back together again after all of that is done. This in itself is already self defeating for several reasons. First, by virtually guaranteeing them no gainful employment, they are all too often forced to go back to a life of crime, resulting in a continuing downward spiral. But second, this is once again attacking the symptoms and not the problem because the real reason why people turn to crime is lack of opportunity. The best solution for this is to offer people alternatives, something which in characteristic fashion, Democrats provide but Republicans don’t. In the 1990s, blame could be more fairly apportioned because both parties actively pushed for a tough on crime standpoint. But in more recent years, Democrats have moved away from this view towards both trying to provide minor offenders with the abilities to put their lives back together again and to prevent those same people from even becoming offenders in the first place. So from this, we can see that once again, the overwhelming majority of Democrats have no interest in banning anyone from owning guns because that’s not what they’re advocating for here. It might work but its not what they are advocating for.3. And we finally come to the main point of all of this, mass-shootings. This has become the centerpiece of the entire gun control debate because it is typically what brings that debate back to the light. Even though the majority of the public supports implementing more strict gun control (55%) and the overwhelming majority (86%) supports using a centralized database to perform background checks, the overwhelming majority of Democrats who advocate for gun control have advocated only for expanding background checks, mostly by increasing the waiting day period, and even fewer have gone on to argue for reimplementing an assault weapons ban.So between all of these factors: from Democrats coming up with alternative solutions to banning all guns, to a lack of sustained effort to implement stricter background checks let alone actual gun restriction, any claim that banning guns is a key component of the Democratic platform is nothing less than a complete lie. So I would ask anyone who reads this, whose platform actually sounds like its pro-gun ownership? Is it the Republicans, whose lack of action is rapidly turning more undecideds into lean pro-gun control people with the possible end result of firearms being completely banned by overwhelming public demand? Or is it the Democrats, who argue that we should implement a tiny amount of regulation while tackling the root causes of gun deaths?