Both sides want to keep more people alive and they are firmly convinced the other side's opinion on how to do that will fail miserably. My parents live in a relatively quiet neighborhood but there was an incident where three unarmed teenagers beat an elderly man to death for money and medication. They were strongly resistant to even toy guns in the house but now they own one because they simply would be overcome if anyone broke in. Gun deaths would drop without guns and maybe even overall deaths, but your position makes the elderly, the female, the weak far more tempting targets than the strong young men you think of as gun nuts. That to me is unconscienable unless you are severely reducing overall violence and that doesn't seem to follow the worldwide stats.