Chas- I'm sorry to take issue with you but I feel you are dead wrong on that point. If your statement were true Australia would have eliminated all their gun-related crime. But just the opposite occurred.Liberalisation of gun laws perpetuates the circle of violence...
This country, and probably yours as well, are completely impotent to disarming the bad guys. So what's the easy (read politically expedient) solution? Make it harder for law abiding citizens to own guns of course! They tried this approach with liquor and then heroin, cocaine, meth, pot and on and on. Let's outlaw cocaine and no one will use it right? Wrong.
The underlying problem, and the reason taking away gun ownership will NEVER work, is there are simply too many guns in the world. Guns were designed to kill people. But when there were too many guns and not enough people to kill, the guns were sold, or dumped or just given away. Surplus military hardware is where the whole problem started. Of course, it is a much bigger problem than that now. There are so many guns in the world right now that even the Diety would have a hard time removing them all.
It is a very sad fact but the only thing that deters a criminal in the threat of violence against them. Prison time is no deterant at all!!
As a polite society we have delegated our personal safety to law enforcement. But the only thing the police can do, despite their good intentions, is process the crime scene after the fact. Unless we are willing to accept a police state (which most Americans aren't) there aren't enough police to protect even a small fraction of us.
One of my favorite sayings is "an armed society is a polite society". But this is a fact. People have nothing to fear from law abiding gun owners. Sure, there will be crazies that will always go from law abiding to psycho in a split second. But most of these people gave signals that there was something wrong. We need to learn to read them better!
But stricter gun laws won't prevent that. We tried to restict assault rifles in the USA. Colossal failure. We tried to reduce the capacity of magazines. All that happened was the bad guys had bigger mags. Every attempt to restrict gun ownership has been a failure and only burdened the law abiding citizen further.
I carry concealed all the time (with a concealed carry permit in two states). Not because I'm paranoid but because I feel a responsibility to my family to protect them and me. I may become a victim of gun violence due to circumstance beyond my control but I'm going to do my best to go down fighting. Without a gun I have no chance against an armed assailant!