1) As best I can tell, owning a gun doesn't increase the risk of becoming a victim of violence.

2) Many decisions in life come with risks: the decision to own a car or swimming pool puts you much closer to the most frequent causes of death for people under the age of 35. But people make rational decisions to do these things anyway and then mitigate the risks in ways that they see fit.

Neither of these undermine the point that liberty and self-defence are actually lowered by gun ownership.

Care to prove that point?

Numerous studies and meta-analyses have shown that gun ownership, even when controlled for other factors, produces an increase of gun deaths in a household of 3x. What would be sufficient proof to satisfy you of this fact?

Having perused the EveryTown material on this topic, which I (perhaps wrongly) assume contains the most convincing material, I see that a major critique of this methodology remains unanswered: that the increased risk of completed suicide is so tightly coupled with military servitude that the role of guns cannot be convincingly established in either the univariate or multivariate analysis.

What do you say to this?

Are you talking about this everytown, which again proclaims the 3x risk of gun deaths?

https://everytownresearch.org/firearm-suicide/

> a major critique of this methodology remains unanswered: that the increased risk of completed suicide is so tightly coupled with military servitude that the role of guns cannot be convincingly established in either the univariate or multivariate analysis.

> What do you say to this?

I say this supposedly major critique isn't represented in the data. The everytown article you seem to be mentioning recommends tighter gun controls.

<slow blink>, yes, we know that the best funded arms restriction organization in the world recommends tighter gun restrictions. Obviously.

I have to say: I think that you have stopped making sense or putting in any effort to this discussion so I'm just going to move on.

In 2016 a meta-analysis of 130 studies across 10 countries also found them to be effective. I think one of the strongest predictors of suicide is gender - but I'm not sure you'd find many gun control advocates advocating for gender based controls. But I suppose since the studies sometimes don't explicitly call out the correlation between gender and suicide that their methodology and conclusions must be... invalid???

I fully acknowledge and think it is an absolute tragedy that veterans can't access the support services they need, and I think that problem, and the problem of mental health issues in America could be mostly addressed by a better healthcare system.

For many of the gun suicides and some of the murders though, better gun control is effective.