The "defensive gun use" argument is weak, even if you take weapons away from only the law-abiding people.
It is normally weak, in public discourse,
being based on Zimmerman fantasies of good guys shooting bad guys who are bent on evil,
but limiting oneself to the weak and nutty cases fails to address the issue - and reading this thread one can hardly help but notice a prevalence of specious arguments, bad stats, and unwarranted assumptions on the part of the "gun control" advocates.
Forget that all first-time offenders were, as far as the evidence shows, law abiding until they pulled the trigger.
You need the percentage of first offense gun crimes committed by people who had not committed any other serious crimes. My guess is that it's not nearly "all".
In any case the odds that a law abiding person will brandish or fire a weapon to prevent a crime is equal to x divided by 200,000,000 in which x is the statistic you pick which claims to know how many victims used a gun defensively. In the above government source I used, that number is 100,000. This means the odds that a gun is used defensively are %0.05.
This entire approach (grouping it with the statistical comparison of guns shooting threatening criminals vs guns shooting family members, etc) overlooks the normal defensive role firearms play, which does not involve brandishing or firing the gun.
Burglary of an occupied dwelling, for example - one of the most dangerous crimes - is generally rare in areas where most occupied dwellings are known to have a firearm handy. And coming the other way, we have the example of the abuses suffered by systematically disarmed black and red people in the US over the years - has the world changed that much in so short a time?
In a world of guns "used" legitimately and well in defense of home and family and self, pretty much the
only people getting shot, threatened, etc, would be victims of accident, crime, etc.
So we deal with them like we deal with cars. We require training before anyone can buy a gun; then they get a gun license. We register them so we can make sure they are maintained safely, not given to criminals, not allowed to be used by children etc. And we require insurance so that if you do injure someone else, they can be compensated for their injuries/losses.
None of that is true of cars. You can buy a bunch of cars and keep them in your barn without any of that stuff - even drive them around on your property. The only people who need that stuff are people who want to drive their cars around on the public streets at will - and people who want to fire their guns - or even just carry them - on the public streets at will do face a host of requirements and regulations, even outright forbidding.
Meanwhile, car ownership, let alone driving, is not a Constitutional right.
And every time that argument is made, a good share of the American public is reminded of the manner in which car privileges are used for leverage by an intrusive and often arbitrary State. Most gun owners also own cars, and they have been abused by these systems.
Who is the gun control bogey man that has you so spooked?
The authoritarians who want to confiscate the guns of Americans are kind of spooky. That simply cannot be done in America without serious and large scale abrogation of civil rights - a prospect that does not seem to bother them much.
And that is in fact the agenda, both public and private, of a large and loud fraction of the "gun control" folks.
Prediction: Take that agenda off the table, quit making scary arguments from public health and the like (blanket justification for all manner of abuses), and ordinary common sense regulation will meet much less resistance after a while