1) Controlling guns won't stop murder. Crazy people will always find a way. Look at what Timothy McVeigh did. You can't outlaw fertilizer.
First, no one arguing for any form of gun control ever argued that gun control would eliminate murder or violence as we know them. When people make the argument above, which is true but irrelevant, they're pointing to a red herring to evade the actual issue of whether gun control could reduce gun death; not whether gun control would *elminate* gun death and violence outright, and usher in a new utopia. This response is like answering "but you can't stop eating or you'll die!" to a person who says they intend to cut back on saturated fats. So if someone throws this red herring at you, simply refocus (if possible) the discussion back to the meaningful question that silly argument 1 evades: could gun control measures *reduce* gun death?
2) Cars/cigarettes/alcohol kill far more people than guns do. So you wanna ban cars, now?
This argument is another attempt to avoid the central question by making ridiculous comparisons. But when we consider "concentration of lethality" for these things--guns, cars, cigs, and booze--it becomes clear that there really is no sensible comparison here. If every time you lit up a cigarette, took a single drink, or went for a ride in your car, you possessed in that single action the potential to kill equivalent to firing a gun one time, you better believe we would be regulating these things more heavily than we already do.
By the same token, if, statistically, as many people fired guns in this country as often as we light a cigarette, go for a drive, or drink a beer--in other words, if frequency and prevalence of use were controlled for in a comparison between the lethality of guns and that of these other things--we'd be stepping over bodies on the way to the grocery store every day. The reason we shouldn't regulate tobacco, cars, and alcohol--very deadly things over the long run and in extreme quantities--as much as we should regulate guns is that guns are exponentially more deadly than any of these other things. One gun shot one time can end a life. If you shotgun a person they die. If the comparison in this argument were valid, it would give a whole new meaning to shotgunning a single beer, which, we know, doesn't kill you. Imagine how many beers you drink, cigarettes you smoke, and car trips you take in a given week. Now imagine what this country would be like if for every instance of those, we all also fired a bullet.
3) Americans are safer because we have more guns.
Usually this argument is accompanied by cherry-picked data or anecdote about how guns make us all safer. You'll get an example of data without controlling for population density, different national cultures, socioeconomic factors that impact crime across the board, etc. Someone will point out that a small, monolithic town in a meat-and-potatoes region of the US (usually in the South or Midwest) has a population of 3000 people, all of whom own a gun, and there hasn't been a murder in Podunk, KS in 55 years! What they won't tell you is that cities with the highest rates of gun homicide and gun death, like Chicago or Detroit, are full of guns, and no safer for it.
Up next you might get sent a chain-mail story about that one teacher in Smalltown, Texas who came to work one day with a pistol and gunned down a criminal trying to stick up the lunch ladies in the cafeteria for cash. What a hero! Also, an outlier.
If you listen long enough to a person making this argument, you'll eventually get some ranking table stats, e.g. the handful of "right to carry" states in the US have less gun homicide, or Switzerland has lots of guns but hardly any gun murder. Again this is cherry-picked data reported without controls and focused not on what happens in the majority of the world, but on outliers plucked to make an untenable case. They're not telling you that without controlling for other factors, the simple fact that a "right to carry" state or a country like Switzerland has less gun homicide--if this is indeed a fact at all--doesn't demonstrate causation between the absence of gun control and the absence of gun murder.
Likewise, that the US witnesses over 9000 gun homicides a year but, fear not, still has a lower gun murder rate than Hondouras and Swaziland, is supposed to convince you that our ratio of guns to homicides is favorable. Hey, look, the US has the highest gun ownership rate in the world, but we're only 20-something in gun homicide rate! Who are these other countries that we share this coveted position with? El Salvador, Jamaica, Colombia, South Africa...
This sort of argument amounts to throwing shit against a wall, because it relies on outliers and non-controlled studies or data to mislead people. As this clear and useful Harvard Public Health literature survey concludes (using controls and spanning the breadth of the published research), more guns = more gun murder.
