> If you take the lower end of the estimate, another way of saying it would be "nearly 40% of the interactions involving this product are used illegally." We strongly regulate things that have a much smaller chance of causing harm than firearms.
I wouldn't take the lower end of the estimate, because most defensive firearms uses are not reported. Firearms are also already highly regulated, yet a number of illicit use still occurs. By your logic, we need fewer firearms regulations to tip the balance.
I don't understand what you are proposing that hasn't already been tried, done, or is completely impractical. Banning things, especially an empowering technology, has never worked. It is better to decentralize and distribute that power - in this case, it is a political power - fairly and equally among all people.
My neighbor just had a police officer move into his spare bedroom full time. I don’t understand why anyone wouldn’t want the police to have another tool to reduce shootings, which this clearly does. It's not like the cop has a personality, with biases and subjective opinions which form his or her worldview and consequent behavior.
Guns do save lives when carried by responsible, law-abiding individuals (and almost all are). Lawfully owned and carried firearms are used defensively something like 10x more than in the commission of crimes.
From the CDC: "Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million, in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008."
> Prohibiting access is by far the best means of preventing those tragedies before they happen.
Sure, just like providing food to starving people is the best way of helping them. Unfortunately, things are rarely so simple and black-and-white, right?
That's hardly the problem. There are millions of people who legally carry concealed firearms in the USA without an issue daily. The "gun" violence is not committed by those people; in fact they are something like 10x more likely to use their gun defensively than to intentionally commit crimes.