Sex crimes as a whole occur at an appalling high rate. I tend to believe the figures that in the US 1 in 5 or more women are raped or sexually assaulted in their lifetimes. The vast, vast majority of those occur through relationships. Stranger rape is pretty rare. The risk from a stranger recidivist in general falls into that category, even rarer. And non-stranger recidivist relationships- every woman develops her own spidey sense- imperfect, to be sure, but still there. In our family we work a great deal on developing that spidey sense when it comes to relationships, though comparatively speaking that's a much greater concern to me in general than stranger rape. I'm just not worried that my daughters or wife are going to find themselves assaulted by a stranger, one who doesn't have a gun.
If that stranger has a gun, everything changes. And that's not a function of the risk of sexual violence, that's a function of the possession of the gun.
In general guns represent an unacceptable- to me- escalation of violent potential. The availability of guns is the most extreme form- that of violence- of inequality between people.
The reason we have a society, a political system, rule of law, regulated military- is so that disputes can be settled as much as possible without violence. Of course people participating in regulated violent entities- police forces, the military- have great difficulty controlling gun use. Many of them join because they want to use guns! But the use of weapons by those entities is vastly (!!) less dangerous than any category of use by even trained civilians.
So that's why. The bottom line is that both sex crimes and gun use are about violence and power. Someone who wishes to exercise power without a gun is vastly (!!) less of a risk than someone who does so with a gun. And I see vanishingly few use cases for the possession of a gun that don't involve the exercise of power.
Hope that makes sense. Best wishes. Thanks for the engagement.