This is a genuinely contested policy question where reasonable people land in different places based on how they weigh competing values. Rather than argue for one side, let me lay out the actual crux points:
Empirical questions people disagree on:
•Does more gun regulation reduce homicides/suicides, or does the evidence show minimal effect once you control for other factors? (Researchers dispute this, partly because US data is messy and cross-country comparisons have confounds)
•Do specific measures (waiting periods, background checks, red flag laws, assault weapon bans) work, versus regulation broadly? These have very different evidence bases—some interventions have decent support, others are more contested.
•Does gun ownership deter crime (defensive use) at a scale that offsets risks?
Value tradeoffs that don't resolve with more data:
•Individual liberty/autonomy vs. collective safety
•Whether self-defense is a fundamental right or a personal choice society can constrain
•Trust in institutions—how much people want police/government to be the sole legitimate holders of force
•Rural vs. urban life differences (hunting, distance from law enforcement, etc.) create different risk/benefit calculations
Where there's more consensus than the debate suggests:
•Most Americans across the spectrum support universal background checks
•Most support keeping guns from people with domestic violence convictions or active psychiatric holds
•Disagreement concentrates more on assault weapons, magazine limits, and licensing/registration schemes
If you're trying to form your own view, it might help to get specific: which type of regulation are you weighing (background checks, permits, bans on certain weapons, storage laws)? The case for each varies quite a bit, and "gun control" as a blanket category obscures a lot of distinct policy choices with different evidence and different value tradeoffs attached. What's prompting the question—are you thinking through a specific policy debate?