The last comprehensive study on gun usage in the United States estimated that there are up to 2.5 million defensive uses of guns in the US yearly, most of which never involve firing a shot. They also found a correlation between gun ownership and lack of injury from violent crimes. Also you can own howitzers in the US, they just require special paperwork and a $200 tax stamp.

https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/18319/priorities-f...

I don't really understand US politics very well but looking at Wikipedia there's stuff like

>poll in ...October 2015 found that 92% of Americans supported "universal background checks for all gun sales"

But you can't do it because the NRA owns your politicians? That's the kind of thing that could be fixed I would have thought.

We have universal (depending on what that means) background checks for everything except private sales currently, you cannot go to a store and buy a gun without submitting one. Private sales are person to person and represent a rounding error in gun sales. Guns are a hot button topic and most people are uninformed so stats like "want universal background checks" doesn't actually amount to anything actionable legislatively because according to most gun owners, we have that, but many that don't own think its the wild west.