I agree with you, guns are tools and it is about who is using the gun. I also agree that liberal media in our country and yours tend to intentionally skew our perspective on guns with imagery that is disingenuous. There also is a lot of people in psuedo-military gear with assault rifles here, that's actually relatively common in the area I live in... Especially at political events.

No, I am not debating whether you are free to take guns to the mall. I don't know what gave you that impression.

Yes, the importance of whether or not someone should own a gun is definitely dependent on the person themselves. However, even with regulation there are always going to be people who should not have guns who will be able to obtain one. The banishment of guns would be for them, obviously, not the majority of people who own guns.

For me, however, it is a matter of risk. Try to separate yourself from your personal situation or relationship with firearms for a moment. What are the risks associated with firearms? Access to weapons that can kill someone with a simple trigger pull or button press for many criminals. Mentally unstable people can kill indiscriminately in public. Finally, there are accidental gun deaths and injuries that could potentially occur.

Compare this to the good things that weapons offer. Some people find them amusing. They could be used for self-defense. Less restrictions by the government is a really good thing.

On the front of being fun, I am glad some people enjoy what they enjoy. On the front of guns being self-defense, I would argue that if the other person doesn't have a gun in the first place then a gun isn't needed for self defense. It would be pretty easy to get away with just carrying mace or something similar if someone cannot shoot you as you pull it out. That is also a non-lethal way to defend yourself... So you can defend yourself without killing anybody. Finally, I am usually against the government banning anything -- but guns are a public health crisis in the US. We have an insane number of firearm-related deaths each year. We have mass shootings nearly every 6 months, usually more often than that.

While I am sure there are ways to solve this problem without banning guns, banning guns is without a doubt the easiest solution. Because mental-health is a commonality in most of these violent events, and mental health is dependent on a variety of both biological and environmental factors. Things that we would need to figure out the specifics for, and things that are going to take a lot of work; and more importantly, time, to fix.

So then the question become to we keep guns legal because some people enjoy them and they are a poor, lethal method of self-defense that requires a lot of skill to use? Or do we ban guns because massive amounts of people kill themselves or others with guns, and some commit mass indiscriminate murder with guns?

For me, weighing these two options the answer is pretty obvious. Banning guns is the fastest way to mitigate the violence and deaths in our country. This argument tends to be one where people are very stubborn, so I am not anticipating you will change your view based on this reply. That's okay, I just wanted to present my points because it seems you really missed them when I made them in the article. Sorry if it was written in a way that was hard to understand. Hopefully this framing at least shows my reasoning on the issue.
Have a nice day!