Here's the problem with the gun nuts. Their two main reasons for wanting to have a gun are silly.
The first silly reason is that they need them to protect themselves from crime. Forget for the moment that out of 11,000 gun homicides in 2010, only 200 of them were ruled valid self-defense. Guns in the home are more likely to kill someone in the home, because between suicides and domestic violence, that's where most of the deaths come from. The Kellerman study found that a gun in the home is 43 times more likely to kill a household member than a bad guy. Congress's brave response to this was to cut any further gun studies.
The second, even sillier reason is that we need guns to protect ourselves against government. Besides the fact that the government will always have bigger guns, better guns and be better trained with them, the kind of people who say this sort of thing are much scarier than the government will ever be.