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Notes -
The archetypal "Saturday Night Special" was a shittyass .32 (or even .25!) revolver for a hundred years -- magnum revolvers were expensive and thus a good choice for Dirty Harry but not for somebody who probably needs to throw the thing in the river every so often.
True, but being limited to card-table guns (in a 400-dollar budget) impose 3 important limitations on the average gangoon:
The fact that it's always the Tec-9 specifically being targetted by "assault weapon" legislation isn't entirely out to lunch, because it was the first gun ever to hit the market that solved all of those issues at once for the average criminal- 200 dollars, 32 rounds, concealable enough, was completely impractical unless it was held properly, and in a caliber of sufficient power to actually take advantage of modern hollow-point projectiles (note also that the vast majority of legislation targeting this pistol came a few years before one of the most famous crimes would be committed with them, though that gun didn't really enable that crime in the same sense it did the average late-80s criminal).
Technically speaking, since the average affordable crime gun is currently either a shitty Taurus or Kel-Tec semi-auto (if you actually care about concealment) or a Hi-Point (if you don't; this is the famous "Glock 40") these restrictions did actually set the average affordable crime gun back quite a ways. The modern service handguns are generally more effective than these, but they're also twice the price on the legal market; likely more on the black market. And when you don't have 1000 dollars to your name to afford one it's essentially unattainable.
(The counterargument is that "average affordable crime gun" is also necessarily "the best self-defense option available for the poor", but reducing firepower for both criminal and poor alike is... politely, something about which bipartisan consensus can generally be achieved. More charitably, if criminals have less then the poor, who are overwhelmingly the target of criminal activity in the first place, "need" less to be on equal footing.)
The point being that swapping some five shot Webley knockoff for a Hi-Point or a Tec-9 as a common crime weapon is unlikely to have been responsible for a decrease in shooting deaths -- I think that we agree?
My point is that the two are not quite the same class of weapon- I think the criminal stock of the latter ramping up may have added a confounding increase at the time it was prevalent, so a decrease after that (when the common weapons for criminals downgraded to Hi-Points instead- if you consider that a downgrade I guess, heh) might not be as completely due to modern medicine.
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