On most issues I'm pretty much a bleeding heart hippie commie liberal. (or so I'm told)
On gun control, however, I'm far more moderate, even leaning right depending on how you draw it. There's no real good reasoning for complete bans on handguns, for instance. There's no evidence to show that strict gun control saves lives, in fact, many of our cities with the strongest gun control laws actually have some of the highest gun-related crime rates. As the old saying goes, "if guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns." A man willing to rob a bank or hold up a convenience store isn't going to be stopped by laws against owning the gun.
Similarly, bans on "assault weapons" fall short a bit too. Virtually no crime is committed with "assault" weapons. You don't rob a bank with an M16. It's too big, you can't hide it under your coat, and most of the population can't shoot one properly anyway. You instead bring a smaller weapon you can conceal. Bullets are bullets. Any gun can kill someone, and any gun is a lethal threat to whoever you're trying to rob/kill.
Things start to break down with the more powerful weaponry, though. It gets harder to make a self-defense argument when it comes to a grenade launcher. Yeah, you can sure kill people with it, but the risk of collateral damage shoots up and it's not really more lethal to the burglar than your shotgun is. Similarly, a stinger missile launcher is pretty much impossible to use in self-defense. What legitimate reason could you have for shooting down an aircraft?
And there just are no circumstances in which a nuclear weapon would be considered self-defense. (for an individual)
To add to the argument in favor of gun rights, conceal-carry laws seem to even decrease crime rates. If there's a possibility that any potential victim could actually be a lethal threat, a criminal is less inclined to go after them. There's a million variables involved with crime rates, so I can't make the argument that more guns = less crime directly, but there does seem to be a correlation. So, since the situation is more ambiguous, the smart thing to do is err on the side of greater individual freedoms.