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Gun owner here.
This is a very good thing.
Like many gun owners, I have a love-hate relationship with the NRA. On one hand, they do a lot of political action, on the other hand, I think they do almost as much to set gun rights back as many anti-gun groups do.
Look at the message they send out, it's always panicked rabble-rousing to raise funds. It makes gun owners look crazy. I get the need to raise funds, but if they focused more on educating the general public about firearms and what makes a gun more or less dangerous and why people own and how they use guns, I think that would do an awful lot more good for everybody. I don't think most anti-gun people are evil, I think they are fighting for what they believe will bring about more safety. Same thing with pro-gun people. Thus, good faith education helps everybody.
It's also become fairly obvious that Wayne and a band of his cronies who have basically a stranglehold on NRA leadership are more or less totally corrupt and are using an awful lot of NRA donations to enrich themselves rather than to further the mission. Maybe that's why they keep sending out rabble-rousing fundraisers.
Anyway here's to hoping that a new chapter brings some new leadership that aren't a bunch of corrupt assholes.
Good faith education means understanding that "belief" has absolutely zero relevance to this conversation. Beliefs can be wrong. The only thing that matters is objective material evidence that one's position is correct.
The gun-control crowd has mountains of evidence that guns make society more dangerous, that firearm regulations reduce gun crime, and that firearm deregulation increases gun crime. This evidence comes from the USA, as well as numerous other countries with varying laws surrounding firearm ownership. Mental health and societal order are contributing factors, but nothing correlates with gun violence like the number of guns on streets, and the causal links are well established.
The gun-rights crowd, on the other hand, has little to no evidence that guns make us safer. This is because guns, objectively, do not make us safer. All reputable data points us solidly to the conclusion that guns increase our risk of injury or death. This is not some matter of opinion or belief, it is a fact, and you can either be right or you can be wrong about it. That is why the gun-rights arguments are generally centered around fear of hypothetical assailants, or heroism by good guys, because when the facts aren't on your side, it's more effective to focus your energy on hyperbole and anecdotes. That, or they just parrot "shall not be infringed", because a religious interpretation of the Constitution makes an excellent thought-terminator when the questions get too hard.
Just because there are "two sides" to an argument doesn't make both sides equal. One side can just be wrong, and in this case, there's plenty of evidence to make that assertion.
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.)