On your last point there..it is almost fascinating that just last month, there was only a brief report on TV about a gunman that came into a church, I think in TX and was about to start shooting the place, but was stopped by multiple folks in the congregation with carry concealed firearms that put the fucker down before he did much damage.
I think one good guy was hurt....but these other good guys with guns prevented more deaths.
It was the same day as the guy with a machete in a Jewish home hurt a lot of people, you heard about that for days, but the story of good guys with guns stopping a bad guy......*crickets"
Disclaimer: I'm not making a gun-law argument, I'm not American, so whatever Americans want to do with gun legislation is all the same to me, it's your country, do with your laws what you will. This is just my 2 eurocents on violence and guns in the US.
Coming from a society where guns are common in hunting circles only and we don't do carry licences, the notion of people carrying guns everywhere is alien to me. While I definitely understand the 'good guy' argument, it's also an answer to a mainly American problem. And don't get me wrong, if I ever moved to the US, it's possible that I too would seek to carry a gun for self-defense, because the likelihood of something like a gunman opening fire in a public space is much higher in the States than anywhere else in the west. So carrying guns for protection in the US is not something I'm inherently against at all.
What I'm saying is that the problem the guns are helping to 'solve' is one that is pretty unique to the US. If a high amount of guns (note: guns carried with individuals at all times, we have a lot of guns as well, as does for example Switzerland, but in both countries it's illegal to just walk around with a weapon, and there's much tighter controls on who gets to buy one, background checks, mental health checks, etc) by their mere presence lead to increased overall safety, you'd expect a country like the US to be at the bottom of the violent crime statistics, but it's not. Now it's not at the top either, but looking at the list of countries by homicide rate, the US is higher than any other western country at 5,30 homicides per 10 000 inhabitants, a level comparable to many African and third world countries.
Now obviously there's a lot of variance by state. But even looking at the state-by-state breakdown of the homicide rate, even the states with the lowest rates sit at around 1,5 homicides per 10 000, which is obviously a lot better, but even that is higher than in most western and northern European countries. Interestingly enough, the top 9 States on that list (Arkansas, Tennessee, South Carolina, Alabama, New Mexico, Maryland, Alaska, Missouri and Louisiana) all sit above 7,1, which if compared internationally puts them higher on the homicide rate list than Iraq and Afghanistan. Thanks to the cartels and the senseless war on drugs though, the top of the list is almost entirely occupied by southern american states, with Mexico at 24,8, and El Salvador at the top with an insane 61,8.
BUT, violence is obviously not caused by just guns alone. A lot of other metrics go into violent crime: poverty, level of education, income inequality, etc, etc. That is to say, I'm by no means claiming (and neither should anyone else) that the amount of guns in the US is the only thing affecting the crime rate. The US has, compared to its western counterparts, a significant issue with inherited poverty, and a notable lack of social mobility due to lack of universal health care and education options, which means that people born into poverty are far more likely to stay in poverty, and this obviously raises crime as crime is globally one of the ways for uneducated poorer people to try and gain an improvement in one's living standard.
The point I'm trying to make here is that having followed the american gun-discussion here and elsewhere for more than a decade now it would appear to me like both sides are in fact talking past each other: the left will bring up stats of mass shootings and such in an appeal to empathy and emotion for the victims, and the right will pull up the 'good guys with a gun' -argument and the whole discussion is soon side-tracked into a meaningless chaotic ramble about bump-stocks, extended magazines and whatnot, as if those things actually made a huge difference in the larger scheme of things, and eventually no meaningful change occurs, and these things keep happening.
This is just a suggestion, but how about trying to talk about the societal conditions that make it so that people picking up guns and randomly shooting other people is now a standard affair in the States to the point that more school kids now die from gunshots than on-duty american police officers or military personal? Because by that stat alone it's blatantly clear to me (and I hope it's clear to most sane Americans) that there is a problem, but even as a European leftist I'm not naive enough to believe that the solution to this problem lies on the 'ban all guns or arm every schoolkid with a magnum' -range that so seems to dominate the hyperpolarized US gun debate? You don't need to give up guns or your the 2nd amendment to take action against gun crimes but if you want to keep the guns and improve safety, you need to start taking better care of your fellow citizens.