But I think they were also quite aware that guns serve many purposes. For the lonely homesteader, the gun is their only line of defense. Communities which are well armed tend to deter criminals. Most criminals are not looking for a fight: they are looking for an easy score. This has always been true, and remains true today.
To this discussion, though, I would add an angle which just occurred to me: a factor worth keeping in mind is the ratio of offensive to defensive gun uses. In a community which has been disarmed by law, one would expect this ratio to be very high. It is high, for example in Great Britain. It is high in Chicago and probably New Orleans.
When you look at poor black communities (this issue would apply in white communities too, but if we are honest, the overwhelming bulk of street gun violence happens in black, and to a much lesser extent Hispanic, ghettos), the problem is often not that guns are not available, but that they are EXPENSIVE, making most of the people who own them people who got them illegally.
In both cases, though, criminals are much more likely to have guns than the people they are victimizing. In such a case, it would look like “guns” are causing violence, and doing little good.
But guns are both a disease–when used offensively–and a vaccine or remedy or medicine, when used defensively. Violence is a disease which is often PREVENTED by the presence of guns. It is prevented when you break into someone’s home and they point an AR-15 at you, as was the case in a video I watched a couple days ago.
And it is also prevented by the idea that you PROBABLY have a gun. Most homes in most of rural America have AT LEAST one gun. And in those areas, crime is very low. As Sun Tzu wrote, for unfailingly secure defense, defend where there is no assault.
He also said to to attack where there is no defense. This is the rough situation of people who own guns where guns are hard to own legally. They have an advantage which is not even remotely mitigated by the possibility of police help. As the saying goes, when you need help in seconds, the police are AT BEST minutes away.
So you need, to evaluate this thing honestly a disease/prophylactic/ or disease/vaccine ratio.
If the CDC wants to treat gun violence as a disease, it has LOGICALLY to treat ALL violence as a disease, for which guns are often the cure.
My hypothesis, which I am quite sure about, is that the ratio will be high where there is legally constrained access to guns–which is a disease out of control–and very low where gun ownership is plentiful. I would suspect there are many communities in America where the ratio is less than one, where guns are used more often to stop or prevent crimes than to commit them.
If violence is the disease–and if you think about it, this point is really indisputable–then anything which alters it in a positive direction must be seen as a policy failure, and as extremely stupid.