If I wanted to kill someone, I'd find a way. If I wanted to kill myself, I'd find a way. Guns only work when a person pulls the trigger. So if people kill, why do away with guns?
Very few people are genuinely advocating total bans. There are definitely some people like that out there, but most people are more interested in restricting ownership.
Anyway. One issue with guns is that they are really,
really good at killing people. Pulling a trigger is substantially easier than stabbing someone. Knives, clubs and spears are far less effective than guns.
Another issue is impulse control and escalation. Many homicide victims know their killer (about half iirc), and a high percentage are a result of domestic violence. What can easily happen is that an argument begins, and it escalates. In many cases, people will grab whatever weapon is at hand, and use it; if that's a gun, the incident is far more likely to end up as a homicide rather than an assault.
It's not clear how many homicides are impulsive, or whether gun ownership rates are a genuine causal factor for homicides.
In contrast, gun ownership is a substantially bigger issue for suicide, which is well understood to be a product of impulse. Note that it is not that the gun
causes or
induces a suicidal impulse. Rather, what happens is that the person has the suicidal impulse, and are much more likely to follow through on that impulse if the means are readily available. Thus, if you
happen to have a suicidal impulse, and you
happen to have ready access to a gun, you are much more likely to follow through on that impulse, and to succeed in the attempt.
In contrast, if you drive 20 minutes to a bridge, only to find it has suicide barriers, you're much more likely to give up the suicide attempt altogether, rather than drive 20 minutes to some other bridge.
In this case, it may make a lot of sense to empower a court to temporarily remove guns from a person who is at high risk of suicide.
We should also note that claims of crime rates skyrocketing without citizen access to guns are fairly easily refuted. In particular, Japan has very strict laws and rock-bottom rates of gun ownership, yet very low crime rates and very low homicide rates. Similarly, big cities like New York and San Francisco have strict laws, and crime / violent crime / homicide rates have fallen there for well over 20 years. Meanwhile, states and cities with high rates of gun ownership rates, concealed carry laws etc don't exhibit unusually low crime rates; in fact, most Southern states have higher rates of both gun ownership and homicide than other regions.
In summary, the notion that less guns mean less violence is just absurd. Sadly, the ones who think that a piece of metal is at fault will never be convinced otherwise.
And yet, it's the ones who think that "a piece of metal is at fault" are usually the ones demanding more data -- and being stopped by those who don't want the slightest restrictions on gun ownership. Go figure.