I really don’t need maths to work out that less guns in private hands leads to less deaths involving guns.

No one who is serious about gun control in the US (whether within or in my case without) is couching it in terms of homicides.

The number of gun deaths in the US is directly linked to the number of guns in circulation and the ease with which guns can be bought and owned and therefore the ease with which they can be reached for in a suicidal moment, or a moment of rage, or be easily stolen or misappropriated leading to accidents and crime usage.

There is no need for statistical maths or data science to make that argument. If there were less guns, and getting a gun were harder and keeping a gun would require greater practical scrutiny (i.e. gun lockers, trigger locks etc.) then less Americans would die as a result of gunplay or misadventure involving guns.

That is an inescapable fact.

Your clever and broadly accurate critique of stats manipulation designed to make America look more homicidal than other countries is well made and well taken, but all it is going to do is give comfort to people that want to keep their guns at any cost. No one in the Western World needs a handgun unless their job is close protection, and then I would expect such work to be carried out by a law enforcement professional under the relevant authority.

Private citizens don’t need a handgun in their home, or their car, or on their person in public. And the “responsible gun owner” argument does not allow for protection, because the responsible gun owner ought to have the weapon secured in a gun cabinet or lockbox, with a trigger lock, and separate to ammunition. If you need a handgun for protection, you need it loaded and to hand, but that’s irresponsible. It can be taken by a suicidal member of your household, it can be found and “played” with by children and it can easily be stolen.

The simpler argument is to not have handguns in private ownership.

You make the point quite well that handguns cause the most deaths, it actually supports your position that the suicide stats are irrelevant though I contend that issue, on the basis that apart from Japan which has pronounced cultural factors that are unique, other 1st world countries that do not allow handgun ownership (at least in the vast majority of cases if not a blanket ban like the one in the UK) have lower per-capita rates of successful suicide. That’s not a coincidence. Ready access to handguns facilitates suicide, just as ready access to Paracetamol (Tylenol) did as well in the UK. Lives would be saved through gun control, right there…

You don’t address school shootings and other mass shootings except to point out that they are statistically insignificant.

Imagine how many gun related deaths you need to have in a country of between 285Mn and 300Mn people for weekly instances of mass shootings carried out with legally owned firearms to be statistically insignificant.

The UK has not had a mass shooting involving hand guns since 1998. We are a country of 65Mn people. The US has these incidents on a weekly basis (at least, in some cases in 2017 they were daily, for weeks at a time).

There is no statistical mathematics that can disprove this correlation.

Greater access to firearms leads to greater numbers of disturbed people carrying out mass shootings. Ease of access to firearms makes them the “go to” tool of exacting revenge, or expressing anger, but there is a side effect to that reality that your model ignores. Firearms make it easier for otherwise normal people to kill or maim other people and to do so in higher numbers. You don’t hear about mass stabbings in the US for a reason — a violent perpetrator with a knife or a sword will be stopped by armed police before they can kill that many people, because people run in every direction and to kill any of them said perpetrator has to close range and plunge their weapon into those people’s bodies. A distressed or exercised individual with a firearm and the basic understanding of how to use it, can stand still and aim and shoot at many people long before they are able to escape that shooter’s effective range. Modern firearms change the game between the armed and the unarmed the point of horror. I haven’t fired a gun for about five years, but I am reasonably certain that I could clear a twelve round clip in a handgun in 4 to 6 seconds and if I was prepared to keep shooting I could reload and do the same again for minutes at a time, though I don’t believe I could carry enough ammunition to carry on for that long without perhaps a carry bag of some kind. Minutes is a police response time. In minutes, a highly trained and extremely physically fit, committed perpetrator might be able to catch and stab or slash to death a handful of people. In minutes an average person can shoot and kill tens of people.

If this happens or happened anywhere outside the United States, just once or twice, then gun control has happened and then no more mass shootings. That is not a coincidence, that is not an example of the “post hoc ergo propter hoc” fallacy. That is simply factual.

You can make all the cultural arguments you want, you can claim that there are just too many guns already “out there”, but the truth is your critique of the media coverage and the arguments that you and many others would make against stringent gun control simply not being workable in the US are summed up better by Jim Jefferies than by me;

“You all just like guns.”

Be honest about it. Stop propping up the gun ownership and manufacturing lobby by lobbing grenades at analysis that you believe is trying to make Americans afraid of homicide. You are not helping. You are perpetuating an environment where clinging to an anachronistic right, that is in itself changeable — it’s there in your constitution by the grace of an amendment, which means that another amendment can change it, and it is not central the holy core of the original bill of rights — is at the cost of hundreds if not thousands of innocent lives. None of the people who lost friends or family in any one of the over 400 mass shootings in the US since the start of 2017 believe that the 2nd Amendment is or was worth the life or lives of the people that they lost.

Step away from poking holes in the left-leaning media and start thinking about the human cost of what you are at least tacitly supporting.