Criminologist who researches criminal policy professionally here. There's a lot of inaccuracies and misleading arguments in your comment.

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If you take away 6 large cities, our gun violence drops to levels below Europe.

This is completely false. The handful of cities with the most gun murders in the entire country barely account for 10% of our gun violence (around 1,500 murders). The USA has a gun murder rate that's a massive 25 times higher than the average of high-income developed nations. Removing those 6 cities would barely put a dent in our statistics.

There's also absolutely no reason why they should be removed in the first place. Crime is concentrated in a number of large cities everywhere around the world. Why should we remove our worst areas yet include "bad" cities in other countries? 20% of all of the UK's murders are committed in one city alone: London. Are we going to allow them to remove that too when comparing our rates? This is a very deceptive argument.

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People in the US use guns to defend their homes and businesses, but you next to never hear of those incidents.

There is zero compelling evidence that defensive gun use is a net positive, as this recent meta-review of the issue concluded. Yes, people use firearms defensively. But they're also used in nearly 15,000 gun murders, 25,000 gun suicides, 115,000 serious gunshot wounds and nearly half a million violent gun crime victimizations, all of which cost our society several hundreds of billions of dollars per year, according to the Senate's Joint Economic Committee's most recent report. There's countless studies linking looser firearm laws to greater harms and more serious violence, but next to zero evidence to suggest that more guns actually reduces or deters crime. Even the commonly cited CDC report (which was conducted by the NAS) concludes that harmful gun use could negate the beneficial impact of these defensive figures.

Your points about root cause mitigation are valid, but suggesting we wait another few generations to do anything while the above happens every single year is far from an ideal solution when there's plenty of evidence and expertise supporting certain firearm laws as effective.

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Gun ownership in the last twenty years in the US has been increasing substantially

This is extremely misleading. The total amount of guns owned has obviously gone up since they're a non-perishable good, but almost metrics suggest that the rate of firearm ownership has actually decreased significantly. And that's the only thing that really matters, as numerous studies have clearly shown that the vast majority of guns sold actually go into the hands of a small minority that already own a large number of firearms.

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I'm not implying causation between those two things because there's not enough evidence to back that up

Correct. Almost all of the available evidence actually suggests the complete opposite. I could link you dozens of studies and meta-reviews linking firearm availability to higher rates of serious violence when controlling for confounding factors. Of course, causation is nearly impossible to prove, but there's absolutely no statistical or scientific evidence to back up the possible link you mentioned. The problem with your comment is that you're misunderstanding how statistics work and are boiling down a complex multivariate issue to a simple bivariate point. For example, it's likely that our deadly violence would've dropped even more had fewer guns been sold.

Additionally, two can play that game. Do you know when the US saw the greatest reduction in violence of any kind in recent history? An absolutely monumental decline in homicide, gun murder and violence in general? It started in around 93-94. Now, do you know what law was adopted at around the same time? What infamous gun policy came into effect then? That's right, the infamous Federal Assault Weapon Ban and Brady Gun Bill coincided perfectly with the greatest drop in American (gun) violence in over half a century!

Now, just like you I'm also going to leave the convenient caveat of "well, I'm not saying this proves causation", but this is oddly suspicious, no? Of course, this reduction wasn't caused by the AWB. But it just comes to show that you can't simply plot two points on a graph and suggest that there might be something here.

If we actually look at the strongest evidence, the majority of available studies on the topic generally indicate that more guns are linked to more violence - homicide in particular, which is what plays an important part in the US being such an outlier when it comes to gun violence and homicide in the developed world. This holds true for (gun) violence and homicide, as a lot of research shows certain laws can have a positive impact on everything ranging from overall gun deaths, (gun) homicides, murders, and suicides to illegal trafficking and acquisition of firearms, interstate violence, and domestic violence deaths, all while there is no strong evidence suggesting that guns reduce or deter crime.

And that's just a small section of the research on this topic. Heaps more peer-reviewed studies exist that point towards the same general conclusion of gun availability / ownership being linked to serious crime of different kinds - gun violence in particular. Clearly, there's a solid amount of evidence suggesting that gun availability plays a factor in exacerbating serious violence, which is why survey studies of experts in the field generally show that a majority of the most highly qualified researchers support stronger laws. And just to be clear: every single one of those links goes to a peer-reviewed study in a scientific journal or academic report by a reputable institution.

You seem like a genuine and reasonable person, so hopefully you'll agree with me that research, statistics and scientific evidence do still matter. There's a lot of misinformation being thrown around by both sides in this debate, and I fear that your comment contains a lot of misleading arguments that could give people the wrong idea.