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We should ban guns below a certain size limit for everyone except police/government agents/licensed bodyguards but otherwise legalize larger guns, including crew-served and mobile weaponry. Most crimes and accidents happen with smaller, easier-to-conceal, easier-to-misuse weapons. Most legitimate uses (hunting, home defense, overthrowing a tyrranical government) are equally or better served by larger weapons, or similarly prevented by less lethal weapons (defending against an assailant who doesn't have a gun of his own.) And of course if someone pulls a gun on you, trying to brandish your own weapon is possibly the stupidest thing you can do. The only two downside to this policy is the specific edge case where A pulls a pistol on B and good samaritan C has no choice but to pull out their concealed weapon and shoot A before A realizes that C has a gun-- but the amount of time C successfully saves A would probably be far outweighed by the amount of times where A doesn't pull out a weapon in the first place because everyone saw the guy carrying an assault rifle from a mile away and everyone already put their shotguns on the table to dissuade any funny business.
"But muh terrorism."
What did you think fighting against a tyrannical government looked like? Essays? Papers? Any measure intended to let agreeable people fight a disagreeable government will equally allow disagreeable people to fight a disagreeable government. The only way to stop a bad guy with a HIMARs is a good guy with a suicide drone.
We do that, gun misuse shifts to larger guns, someone draws a circle around some subclass (e.g. "assault weapons") and moves to ban that one, lather, rinse, repeat.
Personal defense is not.
This isn't actually an argument. If you hold "people asking to ban guns" as an intrinsic evil, then your solution is to ban every gun before they do. If your actual intrinsic evil is "banning guns" then trading a ban on large weapons for a ban on small weapons is at worst net-neutral and at best (as I argued) allows for the better fulfilment of the socially useful properties of guns.
Also, most categories of misuse are linked to specific formats of weapons. A crew served weapon is great in a civil war, but not so great for robbing a convenience store. It's much easier to commit suicide with a pistol than with an M-1 Abrahms.
An assault weapons is a better defense than a pistol against any assailant you can see coming in advance-- and banning pistols makes it much easier to notice and be wary of criminals in the first place. Meanwhile, against an assailant that gets the jump on you, a gun-- and especially a small gun-- is worse that useless. Trying to pull one out is all too likely to transform a robbery into a murder-- either because the assailant will notice your suspicious motion and shoot you, or because a smaller weapon is easier to take away from you. The deterrent property of having a big, obvious weapons would result in net better outcomes than using cowboy kung fu to quickfire your pistol straight through your pants.
In sum, banning small guns and legalizing big ones would both save lives AND provide a bigger deterrent against government overreach. It's the ideal compromise between 2A advocates and gun control crusaders. I'm not being facetious here, this is my actual position.
I didn't spell it out, but it should be obvious. If it is appropriate to ban a class of weapons because they are the weapons with which "[m]ost crimes and accidents happen", then a successful ban on that class will result in another class becoming the weapons with which most crimes and accidents happen and are therefore OK to ban. Thus such a principle leads to banning all weapons.
The second part is not empirically true. As for the rest, no weapon that you don't have with you is much good for defense, and walking around with an AR-15 all the time is simply inconvenient. And even if you have it, presumably slung, the difficulty of bringing it to bear means a pistol-armed (yeah, you banned them, but they didn't listen) or even knife-armed attacker can far more easily get the drop on you.
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