I'm reasonable adjacent.
Yes, somehow the same stats can be used to paint both sides of an argument. I was a stats tutor in college, and I wish I used more of that stuff in my DTD to have retained more of the useful parts of it.
100k defensive uses doesn't mean 100k lives saved. 30k gun deaths....some of those are suicide. Some of those are drug/crime related. Some accidental. No matter what, that death was someone's kid/friend/sibling/spouse at some point and someone is almost certainly grieving. I'm not trying to parse out value of one death vs another, but I think the important deaths to try and cut down on are the innocent deaths. People at the mall, the concert, the parade, the school. If there is any way to do that, I think you have to look at it. My example above about the tax was just pulled out of my ass, but what if levying a 2% tax on ammunition and firearm sales and using that money to create more accessible mental health resources for people ends up cutting the child homicide rate from 3.5 per 100k to 2.5 per 100k. Is that worth paying the 2% tax? 10%? I don't think the solution is nearly that simple, but what if a combination of small concessions like that can all add up to save 1500 innocent lives a year, isn't that worth looking at? How many gun owners would balk at paying $20-50 per year in additional tax if it could be shown to save lives without giving up guns? I'd like to think that there is something like that out there, but I'm not so naive to believe the rest of our government isn't too broken and bloated to effectively create and manage a program like that.
I do get what you're saying though, that everything seems to be a take from gun owners without a give from the other side, and that's obviously not very collaborative. Wouldn't a proactive approach to try to find those alternative solutions be worthwhile in the event that the anti-gun sentiment continues to pick up steam until it reaches a boiling point where there is no longer a discussion, just a reaction from the anti-gun groups? Give up smaller concessions now, to prevent massive ones later? Wishful thinking I'm sure, as any concession probably feels like just a stepping stone to get to their ultimate goal of eliminating guns.