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On this I agree 100%. Feelings don't matter, data matters.
Here's the most important data point I have, that's responsible for an awful lot of my beliefs.
Murder victims by weapon, 2015-2019. Following years are on a newer site that doesn't easily deep link. The result is more or less the same for most years though- each year about 10k-12k people are killed with a firearm. This data is centrally tracked by FBI and can be considered very reliable.
Defensive Gun Uses in USA. A Defensive Gun Use, or DGU, is were a lawful gun owner uses a legally owned firearm to stop or prevent a crime. The overwhelming majority of DGUs (90+%) end with no shots fired; the criminal sees the gun and runs away. DGUs are often unreported (as there's often little to report) and those that are reported are not centrally tracked in any way. That means the only way to estimate their frequency is statistical analysis of victimization surveys. That of course means there's wide disagreement on the overall number of DGUs.
To save you a long read- anti-gun researcher Hemenway estimates 55k-80k/year; pro-gun researchers Kleck and Gertz say it's 2.1 million/year, Cook and Ludwig took a different analysis method and came up with 4.7 million/year. Other analysis of government NCVS data suggests between 100k/year and 370k/year.
The point is, even if you go with low end estimates from Hemenway, Firearms are used 5x more in defense than as murder weapons.
I recognize that's not a perfect comparison, as many of those DGUs wouldn't have resulted in death had the victim been unarmed, and that also doesn't consider non-fatal shootings.
However, the general argument for why 'guns are bad' is because a criminal can kill me with one; I look at this and see another side of that coin.
The other thing I've found as I learned about guns, is that not all gun owners are the same.
I was surprised to find that gun ownership in most areas has as much of a safety culture as pilots. Sure there's a few idiots, but the vast majority of people I've interacted with in the gun community are VERY safety oriented. These are not the people who would threaten you.
The lion's share of gun violence is committed by prohibited gun owners, people who due to previous convictions are already ineligible to possess a firearm. And it's usually committed with an illegal firearm too.
Unfortunately, in these stats you can't easily screen out gang-related violence. But you CAN use your brain.
Go to a site like mass shooting tracker and pick a few stories at random. You'll find an awful lot like 'victim 1 and victim 2 were leaving a house party on whatever block of whatever road, suspect 1 opened fire from a moving vehicle operated by suspect 2. Victim 1 and victim 2 were both injured, as well as bystander 1 and bystander 2. Victim 1 returned fire and injured suspect 1.' AKA, gangland drive by shooting.
My point overall is this- having studied the stats and the reality of guns and gun ownership pretty extensively (more so than most I believe at least), I believe the ACTUAL HARD EVIDENCE (when you don't massage it for example by including suicides in 'gun violence) clearly shows that in the US at least, private civilian gun ownership and concealed carry are NOT the evil that anti-gun people make it out to be, and may even be an overall net benefit for society.
A subjective perspective from outside the US:
If I follow your argument that illegal firearms are the problem, I still believe that the amount of illegal firearms in circulation is a direct function of the legal arms market's size.
And as long as the threshold for acquiring a firearm is low, so is the threshold for injuring someone with one.
This goes for a criminal using an illegal one in a robbery, a frustrated teenager emptying their uncle's poorly secured gun locker for a school schooting or even for suicides: An abundance of guns makes these things easier, so they happen more often.
Mandating stricter controls, safety training or weapon-lockup procedures can alleviate this some, but any process that relies on a lot of not strictly organized individuals to be applied will be fallible and permeable by nature.
Selling more weapons to private citizens will always lead to more gun-related deaths and injuries.
The only way to reliably reduce the amount of weapons in circulation is to sell less of them (and keep removing illegal ones).
Naturally, this is unpopular with an industry that relies on selling as many as possible.
(I'm also aware that something like this would have to be a very slow process. Even if the pool of legal weapons were drained overnight, all those illegal guns would still be around.)
You raise an interesting metric that expands the conversation. However, that metric introduced cannot be considered without its counter. If the majority of DGU results in no shots fired (non-discharge DGU events), and therefore contributes to the unreported positive influence of guns, the opposite must be introduced.
That being: crimes where a gun is brandished by the criminal as a means of coercion, but not discharged; non-discharge Offensive Gun Use events
I'm not even sure what statistics, if any, exist to capture enough data to draw a conclusion, but I would guess (with nothing to back up that guess) that non-discharge OGU events would outweigh the benefits of non-discharge DGU . At that point its also a subjective discussion.
How many non-discharge DGU events are enough to counter the non-discharge OGU events?
OGUs as you call them are almost certainly tracked, if only because they are almost all reported to the police and a crime has actually occurred so a record will be kept. I would be interested in looking at those numbers if you have any? I may search for that myself later on.
However when considering how to address this, we must keep in mind that laws don't affect everybody equally. For example, if somebody is drag racing on public streets, lowering the speed limit from 45mph to 35mph will have no effect on them because they will continue to ignore the speed limit while driving at 90mph. But the law abiding people trying to get to work who follow the speed limit will be slowed down. Thus the good people are restricted and the criminal is unaffected.
Same is true with guns. The person who commits the OGU is already breaking the law, both in committing their crime and in using their gun to do it. You can make concealed carry illegal for example, but do you think that is going to reduce the number of criminals who carry guns? I don't. It will however reduce the number of their law-abiding victims who are armed.
So when we consider what gun policy we should have, it's helpful to remember that we've been trying to keep drugs out of criminals hands for about 50 years now, we're spending tens of billions a year on it, and we've little progress to show for it. Drugs are still widely available. Guns are easier to make than drugs. Drugs require growing certain crops, processing them in a lab, etc. This takes weeks or months of grow time and specialized equipment and chemicals that don't have legit 'day shift' uses. In comparison, schematics for just about any gun are available online, and any decent machine shop can turn out a workable copy. Unlike the drug lab, that machine shop has a legitimate 'day shift' use and can operate in the open.
Point being, I don't think that you can prevent criminals from having guns by restricting the ability of law abiding citizens to own or carry them. Didn't work with drugs, doesn't work with guns either.
I don't think it likely that every time a person brandishes a gun or shows a holstered gun during a crime that it is reported to the police.
You're making a very good argument for a repeal of the 2nd Amendment and banning guns completely. I wasn't thinking about going quite that far, but you're starting to convince me.
This must be why Europe, Japan, Australia and dozens of other nations with gun bans are awash with illegal guns, mass shootings are a regular event, and incidents of firearms used in the commission of other crime are so common in those nations...except they aren't.
The assassination of former Prime Minister of Japan Shinzo Abe was killed with a firearm made in a machine shop equal to an commercial grade weapon...except it was this instead:
This uses black powder obtained by from fireworks with with only two shots before lengthy reloading process would be required. It would also have all of the flaws and failures of the primitive firearm it is allowing intervention of the shooter in many cases.
If the this homemade gun is the result of laws controlling the mass spread of firearms, then I think they would be considered a resounding success.
How is it nearly every other nation on the planet is able to largely accomplish this but you claim its impossible?