Look, I get that some people are fearful and want to own a gun to make themselves feel better.

The fact is, though, that all the statistics indicate that having easy gun ownership makes the US a far less safe place to live than other similar countries. Now, obviously we can look at things like car deaths and healthcare which are arguably larger problems in terms of sheer numbers, but the fact remains that ceteris paribus banning guns would make us all safer, with no obvious social costs other than forcing people to change some of their hobbies.

It’s always possible to come up with some hyper-specific case in which owning a gun is useful, but in the aggregate, the numbers don’t lie. Having lots of people owning guns is a bad idea.