As a moderate, the short version of my point is that I don't believe that crime is a relevant point in gun laws. So if we discount crime as a reason what do we have left: politics and Liberty. Neither of which provide a reason for heavily regulating gun ownership. So if we don't have a reason to regulate guns, we shouldn't.
On the other hand a reasonable low level of regulation to keep weapons out of the hands of the actively insane and to provide a minimum level of competence seems fine to me. As a young person in the late '70s going on my first of several unsuccessful hunting trips in Upper NY State I was required to attend an all day NRA sponsored class. We learned how to handle a rifle, and a pistol, safely, if not accurately, and how to clean and store the weapons we had. How to travel cross country safely with a rifle. What weapons were appropriate for hunting what. A .30-.06 is not good for squirrel. A .22 pistol is fine, if you like a challenge. I tried and didn't get any squirrel, but did bag 3 oaks and a good size pine. And, I don't care what anyone says, those tress kept ducking.
As for the statistics, I don't think they prove anything. We don't know why crime went up in the mid 20th century and we don't know why if fell in the late 20th century and has kept falling. Yes, crime fell in States with very open gun control laws, it also fell by the same amounts in States with very tight gun control laws. It has varied across counties and cities and neighborhoods. As the OP noted, there are very safe neighborhoods in Newark. I'm in NYC, the drop in crime here has been stunning. Happy, but still stunning.
Conservatives who want to overturn gun laws because guns stop crime are wrong; conservative who want to overturn gun laws because they never worked in the first place are right.