The Debate about US gun violence is being done in ignorance.

Wow, that's a pretty powerful title, but it's true.

We can start with Justice Scalia's taking the Second Amendment out of Constitutional and Legal context from it's relationship to USC Article I, Section 8, clause 16 which gives the US Congress the power to arm the militia--ONLY THE US CONGRESS. That was the concern which led up to the Second Amendment as a guarantee that Congress wouldn't neglect the militia in favour of the federal army.  That means the the part about a "Well-regulated militia" is actually quite important to the understanding of the second amendment (come on, I've written about this quite extensively and you would know I am correct if you weren't lazy and actually did some research into the primary sources).

An example of this, Scalia's Heller decision is a classic case of the fallacy of taking something out of context:

The practice of quoting out of context, sometimes referred to as "contextomy", is a logical fallacy and a type of false attribution in which a passage is removed from its surrounding matter in such a way as to distort its intended meaning. While "quote mining" is also used to indicate this, the phrase also has a broader meaning which can instead describe the summarisation of key points (or those someone is opting to focus on replying to) without distorted the meaning. Contextomies are stereotypically intentional, but may also occur accidentally if someone misinterprets the meaning and omits something essential to clarifying it, thinking it non-essential.

But, that isn't really my point, although it does help contribute the US's gun problem.  Which I am sure is also something else which will get the usual "guns save lives" comment.

But, where is the proof that guns actually save lives? Isn't the data showing that guns are a problem?  Wasn't that why the government funding was cut since it had this tendency to contribute to the gun control argument?

That is my point.  The debate is being held in a state of laughable ignorance where people who propose the concept of "gun rights" make statements that more people die from baseball bats than guns.

Jeff Nesbit was the director of public affairs for two prominent federal science agencies who has written an article titled Instead of Studying Gun Violence, Americans Just Argue About It. In this article he points out that the unfortunate truth is this: Scientists simply don't know if gun violence is a public-health epidemic, because hard statistics either don't exist, aren't current, aren't readily available or can't be researched nationally under the usual rules. Until a few months ago, federal science agencies were essentially barred from even studying gun violence within a public-health epidemic framework.

The United States is the only country in the world that treats gun ownership as a fundamental, human right. It's a privilege — not a right — in every other country but America. In countries like Israel and Sweden, you must prove that you have a need to own a gun before you're given a right to own one.
What prompts the public health question, over and over and over, is news coverage of the latest, horrific stories of gun violence at public places like schools. Everyone is appalled, and then forgets — until the next incident.
Right now, Americans are following the awful story of a 12-year-old who took a semi-automatic weapon from home to attack people at a middle school in Nevada — killing a teacher who was heroically trying to stop the violent act. Before that, it was the Navy Yard in Washington, D.C. Before that it was Newtown. And before that it was Perry Hall, Aurora, Tucson and Columbine, just to name a few. And tomorrow, it will be somewhere else.
Americans now own more than 300 million guns. The best available estimates in the United States — and they are just statistical estimates — indicate that there are about 30,000 firearms-related deaths in the U.S. each year, and more than twice that number of non-fatal incidents involving firearms. The United States has the highest number of gun-related injuries of any developed country in the world, according to those estimates.
Is that a gun violence epidemic? Can it be viewed and approached like an epidemic? Again, Americans don't know because our federal leaders — and especially the leadership of federal science agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) — have largely shied away from studying it in this fashion for fear of the political repercussions.
It's long past the time for at least this part of the public debate regarding gun rights to stop. Long, long past time. There can be no harm in knowing how many people die each year from firearms, where those pockets of gun violence really are, and whether there are ways to mitigate or interrupt the violence in those pockets.

The problem is that you can't have a proper debate if the debate is run in ignorance.