I grew up in Connecticut, firmly on one side of the gun culture war. My parents thought it was wrong even to let kids play with toy guns. But I made a vow to myself when I started covering this debate: I would not be one one of those New York City journalists who writes ignorant, condescending stories about “gun nuts.”

As it expanded into the United States, the liberal British newspaper The Guardian did something most media outlets haven’t done: it assigned a reporter to cover gun politics full-time, not just in the wake of the latest mass shooting. My job as The Guardian US’s gun reporter is to explore the big questions: Why do we struggle so much to fix America’s gun violence problem? What would it take to save more lives?

When I actually dug into the data, I was shocked by how little evidence there was behind some of the most prominent gun control policies. Here are some basic facts that gun rights advocates already know—and that liberals who want to reduce gun violence need to understand.

1. Banning assault weapons would do almost nothing

After every high-profile shooting, Democrats like Hillary Clinton call for a ban on “assault weapons,” the military-style rifles that have been dubbed the weapon of choice for mass shooters.

There’s a problem with this popular liberal idea: banning these guns would not do much to save American lives. Only 3.6 percent of America’s gun murders are committed with any kind of rifle, according to FBI data. The majority of gun murders are committed with handguns. Even the Democratic staffers who wrote the now-expired 1994 federal assault weapon ban knew it was a largely symbolic policy.

There’s some evidence that banning high-capacity ammunition magazines might—over the very long term—reduce gun injuries. But a ban on the guns themselves “does nothing,” a former Obama administration official said last year. Though the White House endorsed a renewed ban after Sandy Hook, “we did the bare minimum,” the official said. “We would have pushed a lot harder if we had believed in it.”

The real effect of Democrats’ decades-long war on “assault weapons,” some advocates speculate, is that it’s simply made military-style guns more popular.

2. Owning 17 guns really isn’t that extreme

Just 3% of American adults own half the country’s guns, a new Harvard/Northeastern study estimated—and they own an average of 17 guns each.

To a non-gun owner, this might sound like a lot. But you have to think of guns as tools: a few different rifles for hunting different kinds of game, plus a shotgun, a handgun or two for self-protection, and some antique guns inherited from your grandfather. It adds up fast.

As one gun rights activist put it, “Why do you need more than one pair of shoes? The truth is, you don’t, but do you want more than one pair of shoes? If you’re going hiking, you don’t want to use that one pair of high heels.”

3. Only a tiny fraction of America’s guns are used in crimes

American civilians own between 265 million and 400 million guns. That’s at least one gun for every American adult. (There’s no official national count. Gun rights advocates are fiercely private about gun ownership and fear that if the government can track guns, it will be able to confiscate them.) Gun control advocates often note that America’s gun murder rate is 25 times higher than other high-income countries, and that this drives an overall murder rate than is 7 times higher than other rich countries.

Inside the Federal Bureau Of Way Too Many Guns The country's "database" of gun owners is bigger–and messier–than you think.

But the vast majority of America’s gun owners—and their guns—aren’t involved in this violence. About 100,000 Americans are killed or violently injured with guns each year—a number that includes gun suicides. The total number of crimes involving guns is higher: as many as 500,000 a year, according to Justice Department estimates.

Roughly speaking, that means that fewer than 1% of American guns are used in recorded crime or violence each year. Most of America’s hundreds of millions of guns are sitting in gun safes, being used for target practice or hunting, and causing no harm at all.

4. Gun crime dropped even as Americans bought more firearms

After the school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, pollsters asked if Americans thought gun crime was increasing or decreasing. 56% said gun crime had gone up over the past two decades. Only 12% knew the truth: gun murders had dropped by nearly 50% since the early 1990s. Over the same time period, Americans bought an estimated 70 million more guns.

This trend isn’t proof that more guns equal less crime—many factors drove a spike in gun violence in the early 1990s, and a drop afterwards. But it does show that the relationship between America’s high gun ownership rates and its high gun murder rates is more complex than a simple correlation.