Instead of rhetoric, here are raw gun statistics for the United States, along with corresponding questions.
There are about 77,400,000 gun owners in the U.S. The most recent gun stats for 2020, which was a violent year, say that the percentage of gun owners involved in a gun death that year was .058%.
Would you ban gun ownership for the 99.95% to stop the .5%?
Roughly half of those deaths were suicides. So if you remove deliberate self-harm from that percentage, the number of gun owners involved in a gun-related homicide becomes .031%.
Would you ban gun ownership for the 99.97% to stop the .3%?
Instead of talking about people, let's apply those statistics to guns themselves. There are an estimated 400,000,000 guns in the United States, if you include guns owned by the government (but not including "off-market" guns, like so-called "ghost-guns").
The percentage of guns involved in homicides in 2020, an unusually violent year, was .0048%.
Would you ban 99.996% of guns to stop the .004%?
Of course, if guns were banned, the government, and law enforcement would still have guns. So you would just be banning them from the populace. Something to consider. These are the numbers.
Ryan Wiggins is the author of the extremely serious and not funny robot novel, The Life of Human, and is a writer and producer of television shows. He is the host of Wiggins America on 97.1 FM Talk in St. Louis.