You need guns to defend your 1st Amandement, not statistics!

We - the libertarians - are trying to convince other people - statists or leftists - that the gun ownership is a natural right of each person, and it is also immoral and impractical to disarm people. Many discussions on that are going nowhere or even escalating our opponents aggression toward weapons. So, libertarians are feeling disappointed and angry.

The problem is that there is no sense at all in trying to change another person's opinion about guns with logical arguments, since people do not have a tendency to take political problems with reason - they just "feel" one way or another, and they are going scream loudly their feelings and ignore your points. The statistics data, which You or they could use in that discussion is unimportant - it only covers our and their emotions about our intrinsic moral intuitions.

These moral intuitions are what is most important in that conflict. Our, libertarian moral intuition says that "each every man is a free individual, who has the negative rights to use freely his body, and his property as he perceives them to be useful. According to this natural law, nobody - not individual nor the group of individuals - has right to initiate force against anyone else,".

The statist or leftist "moral intuition" says that "we are all the part of one great society, people are like a big family and should behave so. Nobody owns "himself" and everybody owns each other. According to this point of view, there are no individual rights at all, or they are strictly connected to the will of the collective which is an ultimate god deciding who has which 'rights' or 'obligations'. So 'society' can restrict any "right" and do with the individual whatever the collective like.".

The fundamental difference between these two moral intuitions makes the rational discussion between libertarians and collectivists impossible.

There is problem with use of statistics in such a discussions also, since you simply can use a statistical data to "prove" every thesis, you want. Statistics are just bunches of numbers, and without a good - by "good" I mean a coherent and logical - theory, you are unable to make any sensible statement. And that is not even all: second problem is that the social interactions and situations when people use brutal and even lethal force against each other, are off too complicated to just count, describe, and explain them by the series of numbers such as "FBI mass shootings data" etc. There are hundreds factors and thousands of variables, which count, and nobody could just "discover how it is with guns: are they making us safer or opposite?". There is no scientific answer to that. Statistics are just a historical data about past events and say to us only what happened somewhere someday, when some people did some things for some reasons in some conditions. Most of those things, reasons and conditions are fleeting and unique, so the data can not tell us what to do in the future.

So, when another statist or leftist is going to overwhelm You with the stack of anti-gun statistics, just ignore him, do not try answering him with your collection of pro-gun research. We need just keep our arms, accumulate ammunition and say them, that they are going to die rather, than take our weapons from us.

But I do not say that you should throw your statistics, arguments and all the rhetoric's away! Keep them and use to convince some undecided people, who are not libertarian, nor statists and have no their own strong opinion on the subject. Their are still in reach of "our agenda" and having as good data, arguments and articles as you can, would help.