Illegally Carried Handguns Are the Problem

Switzerland has the same or even more guns then USA per capita and they don't have these problems.

So the author destroys his entire argument in the 1st two lines.

Wikipedia's entry on Gun Violence in the US [1] highlights some interesting points. If you look at their infographics for household gun ownership by state [2] and the state by state murder rate [3] things are all over the place. While Missouri and Louisiana fit the 'more guns, more murders' narrative, California and Maryland flight exactly the opposite to it. Montana and Wyoming's gun ownership rates are some of the highest in the country, but they have some of the lowest gun homicide rates as well. This makes me seriously question the 'more guns, more gun homicides' narrative. Yes, the United States loves its guns, and that's honestly perfectly OK. With approximately 350 million guns in this country, for every homicidal maniac with a gun there are at least 10,000 responsible gun owners.

Beyond that, whenever there is trouble the first call people usually make is to, you guessed it, the guys with the guns (aka, the police). There is nothing wrong with calling the police in such situations, but these situations often are over in seconds. This has led to gun ownership supporters creating sayings like "When seconds count, police are minutes away" which is not exactly inaccurate.

There is also no greater equalizer when it comes to self-defense than can be found in guns. On that note, a CDC led study [4] ordered by former President Obama estimated defensive gun uses to be anywhere from 500,000 to 3 million instances per year. This number has, of course and rightly so, been challenged but repeated studies and surveys have shown that they were not far off the mark. Results from these efforts are usually around 1 million (with a recent survey putting it around 1.7 million [5]), which means that for every life lost in gun homicides, which currently floats around 20k (not including suicide since that's a different category), around 50 lives are saved in some fashion with guns. I certainly don't want to diminish those whose lives have been affected negatively by guns, but we can also not ignore their positive use in self defense.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_Sta... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Household_Firearm_Ownersh... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_states_showing_num... [4] https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/18319/chapter/3#15 [5] https://reason.com/2022/09/09/the-largest-ever-survey-of-ame...