There are at least two obvious and opposed positions:

More gun ownership = safer streets and a less violent society.
Restricted gun ownership = safer streets and a less violent society.

The science of civilian gun ownership supports both sides of the gun control argument, but I suspect that otherwise sane citizenry and mentally unbalanced shooters have something in common: they make their gun control choices without the science.

Two Yale Law profs, Donald Braman & Dan M. Kahan, examined the gun control debate in their 2006 Emory Law review article, "Overcoming the Fear of Guns, the Fear of Gun Control, and the Fear of Cultural Politics: Constructing a Better Gun Debate" available at:
http://www.law.emory.edu/fileadmin/journals/elj/55/4/Kahan.pdf

In their opinions, scientific and statistical arguments are void if the underlying cultural factors are left unvoiced.

Two paragraphs stood out to me:

For one segment of American society, guns symbolize honor, human mastery over nature, and individual self-sufficiency. By opposing gun control, individuals affirm the value of these meanings and the vision of the good society that they construct. For another segment of American society, however, guns connote something else: the perpetuation of illicit social hierarchies, the elevation of force over reason, and the expression of collective indifference to the well-being of strangers. These individuals instinctively support gun control as a means of repudiating these significations and of promoting an alternative vision of the good society that features equality, social solidarity, and civilized nonagression.

These competing cultural visions, we will argue, are what drive the gun control debate. They are what dispose individuals to accept certain empirically grounded public-safety arguments and to reject others. Indeed, the meanings that guns and gun control express are sufficient to justify most individuals positions on gun control independently of their beliefs about guns and safety. It follows that the only meaningful gun control debate is one that explicitly addresses whether and how the underlying cultural visions at stake should be embodied in American law.