Most Gun Control Advocates Fear Guns Through Ignorance

In my debates with gun control advocates, I have actually changed a few minds and helped them see things from a different perspective. One of my premises is: if you really want the guns banned, you fit into one of three categories; you are either ignorant to their true impact on crime in the US (forgivable), you are stupid because you've been given the data but can't make the connections (sad, but forgivable), or you are dishonest because you know the stats, you know that the law won't do anything, but you can't help trying to interfere in other peoples' lives anyway (unforgivable).

I cannot debate with people who refuse to acknowledge that:

• Increased gun ownership leads to greater hesitation for criminals to commit crimes as demonstrated by the lower crime rates of states with "shall issue" laws concerning concealed carry permits rather than "may issue" or forbidden concealed carry. Other studies have also shown this to be true as well.
• Criminals obtain their weapons illegally and can do so faster, even where they're banned, than a law abiding citizen can obtain one legally from a licensed FFL who does a federal background check
• Gun bans in other nations have lead to large increases in violent crime, especially home invasion, robberies, and rapes. Other studies have also demonstrated this fact.
• Suicides, which make up about half of the gun deaths in the US are largely unaffected by availability of guns; other countries that have instituted gun bans have seen suicide by gun numbers decrease sharply (common sense) while seeing suicide by poison, cutting, hanging, or drowning all increase
• The vast majority of firearm deaths and injuries occur in places where guns are highly regulated (large cities like Chicago, New York, and Washington, D.C., which all have higher murder rates than many Central American countries) and is almost exclusively due to our failed war on drugs, which is the true cause of higher death and crime rates in the United States

The people who refuse to acknowledge those facts are, in my opinion, stupid: slow to learn or understand; obtuse. They cannot be reasoned with because they cannot even connect the dots together and see the bigger picture.

I also cannot debate with people who are actually intelligent, they can see these facts and know that the type of gun control they are advocating for (bans of certain types of weapons, increased background checks, limits on magazines, etc) would not work and in fact, might even make things worse for a while. These are the people who, while usually intelligent, have allowed their brains to take a vacation in favor of using their emotions to make decisions. Instead of rationally acknowledging that there is no increase in mass murders in the United States, that the event itself is actually so rare that a trend line cannot be calculated and that we just hear about them more because the media sensationalizes each one, and instead of acknowledging that the murder rate in the US has actually DECREASED by 54% in the past 20 years, they allow politicians who ask loaded questions like, "How many more babies must be slaughtered?" to illogically sway their judgement.

The people I do have success, however, in changing their opinion, are those who are ignorant to guns, people who think and say stuff like this: 

It is natural to fear what you are ignorant of. In fact, that may be a natural human instinct that allowed us to survive as a species. However, I'm sure man was afraid of fire at first too, but it was only though understanding how it started, how to control it, and how to extinguish it that we harnessed its power and ensured our survival. Firearms are no different. Many people opposed to gun control are opposed due to ignorance and fear because they have never learned firearm safety, never carried one, and never fired one.