I meant criminals in this context as anyone who commits a crime using a gun. If you shoot someone you're a criminal regardless of whether you used an illegally acquired gun like a "career criminal" certainly would or if you had the gun legally and then decided to commit a crime.

And I can't really agree with your assertion either. See stats in [0] and a gun law map in [1]. At best it's a correlation without causation, but the correlation certainly isn't the inverse as you suggest.

I also don't see how it's not a relevant example - it's Thing A making Thing B worse, but Thing B would still happen without Thing A and so Thing A can't be blamed for Thing B. Regardless of whether the underlying assertion is correct (less gun control leading to more gun crime), the logic is valid.

[0] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/gun-death... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_of_gun_laws_by_nation