I find it odd that people point to gun deaths done by free lance criminals, while skipping right over two other important categories of gun violence.
The first are the gun deaths caused directly by governments against their own people or people from other places. They number in the hundreds of millions. Do THOSE lives matter?
Death by government, democide or genocide and "collateral damage" (a euphemism for murder by military) far outnumber freelance gun deaths. Yet, crickets. Odd. It's as if people are unable or unwilling to consider those deaths in the discussion of who should and shouldn't have guns.
The second is the embedded violent threats of gun use that are omnipresent in all government laws, edicts, and policy.
Meaning, while citizens weren't killed directly by their "public servants", but the real threat of them being killed is ALWAYS just below the surface.
Would guns be used violently if you fail to comply with any number of draconian policies every government uses to extract and redistribute wealth or to control behavior of otherwise peaceful people? Certainly, they will. They'll even shoot your dog just for fun.
For instance "school shootings" are horrible. Yet, few people consider and even fewer will have a rational discussion about the guns used to fund those same schools. Again, odd. Kids brought up in that kind of contradictory culture are bound to be affected.
I suggest one of the causes of this learned flawed bias is many people remain ignorant or are inerred to the differences between the two kinds of uses of force. Using guns to apply offensive force and using guns to apply defensive force. The concepts are distinctly separate. One is bad, one is not.
It's like people are trained to default to the idea the only people who should use or threaten to use offensve force are those that rule them, cutely referred to as "their representatives". That's a sign of mental capture, a kind of mass stockholm syndrome.
Most people correctly know when free lance criminals use offensive force, it's wrong, but they ignore it when it comes from people they've grown up thinking have some kind of special rights, and who claim the power to invert logic.
I suggest that any discussion of "gun control" is incomplete if it ignores ALL of the data and ALL of the embedded threats of the use of OFFENSIVE force people are under every day.
If you want to reduce gun violence, there should be no sacred cows.