And it's not just me. There have been many many campaigns to reduce gang violence that have wanted to ban guns.
"NOBODY" is wrong.
And here is the issue: you can't ban guns. Even if you do, it doesn't affect gun violence AT ALL. I can point to examples like Washington, DC, NYC, and Chicago as examples. All cities have had very strict gun control laws (and even knife control laws) and yet they haven't eliminated gun violence. In some cases, it actually increased.
So this is a sociological problem that doesn't have a simple answer. Making "guns" the boogeyman is just another example of avoiding the problem by politicians. That's a real issue when it comes to restricting a fundamental right to bear arms.
And yes, I said fundamental. The Constitution was designed to recognize and protect rights, not grant them. Those rights are natural rights given to men by virtue of their existence in the world, not their presence in any particular jurisdiction. It's a distinction that I wish more people were aware of.
NOBODY on the gun-control side of things care much about the VAST majority of gun deaths; namely, gang-violence or drug-related shootings. By far, these are the largest component of murders by gun and yet the thing that really motivates Sally Housewife to get politically involved is a shooting involving "good people."
MOST gun deaths are suicides. MOST gun murders are committed with handguns. Please explain to me how favorite talking-points like "we need to restrict assault weapons" or "we need to restrict magazine capacity" or "we need to expand background checks" do anything to tackle the real meat of the problem. HINT: they don't.
The problem of gun violence is simply a sub-type of the problem of VIOLENCE. If we could figure out how to completely eliminate violence, we'd have done it by now. My suspicion is that we're asking for the police/government to do something that is impossible: keep all the bad people away from me. if only it were so simple.