I’m anti-gun AND anti-gun control. The fact is that guns are simply not that significant. Non-self-inflicted gun deaths are rare, especially among non-criminals. Violent crime in general is rare.
Guns are objectively a poor choice for personal safety in most cases; the time and money involved in responsibly (or even irresponsibly) owning a gun would be far more effectively spent on the electrical wiring in your house or the brakes in your car or (if you’re in an especially crime-ridden area) security features for your house. The statistics show that owning a gun makes you slightly less safe on average. But that’s just an average; it’s entirely possible that in your particular case, owning a gun has a positive effect on you safety. It probably doesn’t, but it’s possible. It’s very unlikely to have a large positive effect comparable to that obtained by other means. And there is no evidence whatsoever that your owning a gun makes the rest of us safer on average, although obviously you can find individual cases of gun owners saving other people, just like you can find cases of gun owners accidentally killing other people.
At the same time, though, gun control like the AWB is almost laughably ineffective. And gun crime is already rare. Spree killings are rare (just newsworthy). Even if future gun sales could be absolutely prohibited from now on, it wouldn’t make us that much safer than we already are. Even if every gun in the US could be confiscated and melted down, the increase in safety would be small enough that I’m not sure it would be worth the cost. Spend that money on road improvements. That’s not to say that NO gun control laws are cost effective, and there have been some good suggestions here, but the anti-gun side in government and media seem incapable of distinguishing which ones those are.
And I do think that if the government wants to ban anything, it should have at least a plausible case for what benefit will be obtained. Especially when the thing to be banned is something people have strong feelings about. I hate our gun culture, I hate guns, and I would love to live in a society with fewer guns. I also hate reality tv, but I don’t think the government should ban it. My desire NOT to have reality tv banned is just as irrational and emotionally based as the gun lovers’ desire not to have his stupid, dangerous killing tools taken away. This can be proven by asking me whether I would want tv strictly censored by the government if it could be absolutely proven to lead to fewer deaths, smarter children, and better sex. Barring some really dramatic benefits in those areas, I’d say no. And not because I have data showing that freedom of speech benefits society in some tangible way. Canada and Europe have restrictions on speech that would never pass muster here. No, I would still want freedom of speech, even if it caused some harm, for exactly the same kind of fuzzy, pseudo-philosophical, emotionally-driven reasons that the pro-gun side wants gun rights.
Now, I try hard to be a rationalist. I don’t LIKE the fact that I base some decisions on fuzzy emotions. And I generally don’t think that fuzzy emotional reasons should guide public policy. But I also think that in public policy, the burden is on the side that wants to restrict freedom. I’m a liberal, not a libertarian, so I don’t set that bar too high, but I still think the null position is to oppose government action unless the benefit can be shown to outweigh the cost. And I think it is reasonable and rational to set the bar a bit higher when the people being regulated feel very strongly about it, even when I disagree with their feelings.