Generally you don’t need the gun to protect yourself from someone who is protecting themselves with a gun- the idea is more that you need the gun to protect yourself from the person who has a gun to do harm- such as crime, or to protect yourself from gangs and groups of thugs who don’t have guns but outnumber you. Enter the cliche paradox that outlawing guns would then just largely mean that outlaws would have guns since they traditionally… don’t follow the law. Now- the argument holds that outlawing guns would most likely reduce the amount of guns in the hands of outlaws. That may or may not be true. Outlawing drugs has not seemed to decrease the amount of drugs in the country or access to drugs.
The next problem comes from history and culture. Asides from revolution and later civil war, the United States was not previously host to urban development and large areas were without infrastructure. In other words, from the inception of the country, guns have been a part of people’s lives- not just for protection but for work and sustenance. As a matter of fact the USA still has large regions where people can regularly encounter dangerous animals and where hunting game or killing live stock are still parts of peoples lives. It is hard to imagine someone in urban or suburban America or Europe “needing” a gun, but like many rural areas of the world, guns are actually still tools in many places in the USA. They tend to be fairly extraneous in urban settings and generate more of a liability than a boon, so of course most urbanites view guns as unneeded and foolishly dangerous because they don’t live in an environment where a gun would be a very regularly useful tool.
Contrast that to Europe where there hasn’t been a true “frontier” for centuries and certain realities of government, economics, and other factors have traditionally made guns less common through most parts and most of the history of the firearm.
The tooling and knowledge to make guns and ammunition are common enough that even if one successfully stopped the production and flow of these items and could somehow exhaust the surplus in existence, there wouldn’t likely be any real hope that such weapons would no longer be used for crime. What’s more there are slews of projectile weapons that could replace guns and can be home made or readily attained, and the criminal culture in the US differs from abroad as abroad differs from each other.
The legal system and ability of police and government to restrict and enforce such bans differs and the geography and demography of America makes the concept of the type of policing found in Europe laughable. The genie is out of the bottle already, and as we have learned in cases like Waco and with “sovereign citizens” and as the January 6th events hinted at- there is also a fine balance to be kept while trying to curtail gun violence to not push the extremists over the edge. The truth is that even if the government has the power to put down a mass uprising if most or all the extremists in the nation were galvanized in fear of what they saw as totalitarian measures, it would be costly, bloody, and all around bad for the nation and its people.
The tooling and knowledge to make guns and ammunition are common enough that even if one successfully stopped the production and flow of these items and could somehow exhaust the surplus in existence, there wouldn’t likely be any real hope that such weapons would no longer be used for crime. What’s more there are slews of projectile weapons that could replace guns and can be home made or readily attained, and the criminal culture in the US differs from abroad as abroad differs from each other.