"They're not."

Too bad. I could have just come up with a really convincing argument against having wars for stupid reasons when you don't have souls.

"Well, it probably wouldn't hurt."

My people are very contrarian and if you came up with a convincing argument they should not have wars while not having souls, they might get more likely to have such wars if they disagreed with your argument. Which would still not be very likely.

"I guess it could hurt if you worded it very insensitively."

I think I need to learn more to word it at all.

"Yeah. If you're going to be here long-term - as opposed to going home tomorrow afternoon with a Junebug teleporter whose limits differ from mine - you will probably want to learn to read English and check out the Internet."

And what's that?

"The Internet is a globe-spanning library-like thing accessible from computers."

....oooh.

"We are very proud of it! It has weird unpleasant parts because random people can put anything on it anonymously but mostly it's a crowning human achievement."

- maybe the ones who put awful things just because they can are the ones who should not have weapons for killing people?

"...do you want me to actually explain why not that or should I just say 'it's complicated, but in fact, not that'."

Can I guess? There are ridiculously many of them and they're not guaranteed to randomly shoot people just bizarrely likely and ... maybe the guns also have harmless uses so it's very sad to take it away from someone who was going to use it for artwork or theatre?

"Artwork or theater in particular aren't so much the thing but there are hobbyists and hunters, and also this country in particular has messy history with respect to gun ownership."

...people not being randomly killed is really important. And you can hunt without, uh, guns.

"Yes. I know. Do you want to guess more, or do you want me to explain, or -"

An explanation would be helpful.

"Okay, so, in many countries, gun ownership is tightly regulated. This does reduce the rate of gun violence but it's not clear that it affects the murder rate - insofar as they differ, it could be a lot of things, and they don't differ strikingly enough or on a suggestive enough schedule relative to those laws to have settled the issue. People can just stab each other with kitchen knives, and there's black markets for things that are prohibited to own. And this country in particular is based around a history of having violently revolted against a monarchist regime on another continent that was ruling it remotely, and in the process of establishing itself it - the United States, where we are now - decided it was particularly important to list rights that every individual citizen has. One of them, specifically because of the violent revolution thing, is the right to have guns around, explicitly in case further violent revolutions are necessary. There are some obstacles to casually owning guns and in particular to carrying them in a way that isn't visually obvious, but since this is framed as a right, a lot of people consider it really intrusive to talk about taking the guns away because of other people who might do bad things with guns; it would be sort of like - I don't know if you have any analogous situations, it sounds like your world's really different, I'll make up a few analogies in case any of them stick. It'd be sort of like saying no one can have children because some people abuse theirs, or that people can only have sex with chaperones supervising because some people commit rape, or that you have to hire a professional to do everything that might require a sharp object from opening packages to chopping broccoli because people sometimes use kitchen knives to stab people. There's enough people who feel strongly that being allowed to own guns is a really important right to form a voting bloc, and we're a representative democracy, so people who want to attain political power can't antagonize those voters too badly."

...we would probably not have children if some people abused them and we couldn't think of a way to stop that aside from everyone not having children. We would definitely prohibit kitchen knives. I'm not sure about the sex thing, I think something's different there because - oh, because you don't come back if you die. I think if we did not come back if we died and people were forcing people then we might require marriages to be witnessed but probably not subsequent relations.

"Okay, well, to a human perspective banning kitchen knives is obviously ridiculous and banning guns is less so but a difference in degree not kind, most anyone would find the idea of not being allowed to have kids because of what other parents did intolerably offensive, I don't actually know what the heck you're talking about with the last example at all, laws that are staggeringly unpopular are impossible to enforce."

If someone tried to force me to have sex I would just die. Since dying is worse for your species, presumably some people wouldn't be willing to do that. No one in our society does ever try that as far as I know, but that could be because they know that obviously the person they attacked would die.

"We don't, uh, die of that. It's bad but not fatal."

- I mean, you wouldn't have to, Elves would just universally choose to, which is a choice that makes more sense when being dead is fixable.

"- wait, at what point in the process are you imagining an opportunity to commit suicide?"