I would disagree that gun ownership is "ostensibly" protected by the Constitution. It is quite explicitly explained as an individual right in the Constitution and there are several Supreme Court decisions (District of Columbia vs Heller being the most well known one) which emphasize and reinforce that right. "Ostensibly" would suggest that there is some legal ambiguity or disagreement over whether firearm ownership is supposed to be an individual right; while there are many different opinions on this issue, the overwhelming majority of case law has acknowledged that it is an individual right.
You're absolutely right; there are many limitations and regulations in place for firearms ownership. The biggest loophole perhaps is that private sales don't require background checks. That aside everyone who purchases a firearm from a vendor must undergo a background check. Fully auto firearms are prohibited, with with a few exceptions for people/vendors who get the proper licensing.
The issue is not that America's existing firearm regulations are woefully inadequate. It's that there is a huge criminal demand for firearms, and a large blackmarket in place which is catering to that demand. We've also outlawed many different types of drugs, but that doesn't stop criminals from getting them and selling them in an industry which generates tens of Billions of $ every year.
I'd be interested in hearing from you and others what "better" regulations we could put in place to regulate firearms. For the most part, we have fairly thorough checks on firearms sales (with the exception of private sales). In my area of NY, a law-abiding citizen has to put up with a year-long wait to find out whether or not he/she is approved for a pistol permit and semi-auto rifles and so-called "assault weapon" features are banned or highly restricted, but criminals have no problem getting a hold of either type of weapon and using them in crimes.
If you acknowledge that criminals aren't going to obey these laws in the first place, then why is it so important that we levy additional restrictions on firearm ownership for the law-abiding citizen? It seems to me that such an action merely makes it harder for the law-abiding to get a weapon while the criminals still conduct their business as usual.
This analogy you use and has been regurgitated over and over again on certain media channels, but it doesn't hold up to scrutiny. There are limitations to a person's First Amendment rights. But a person is not preemptively gagged prior to making a slanderous or harmful (think crying "fire" in a crowded theater) statement. Rather, they are punished after the fact. Your right to free speech is not restricted beforehand, rather you are punished afterwards if it is deemed that you spoke in slanderous or dangerous fashion.
The difference relative to all of these proposed and existing gun regulations, is that the government is preemptively restricting and in some cases taking away the individual citizen's right to possess certain firearms. The punishment or "gag" order is being universally administered before any crime has been committed in an attempt to keep a few bad people from using the weapons in a criminal fashion.
There are many limitations on some of our individual rights, firearm ownership included. But many people, yourself included, acknowledge that new laws will mostly affect those who obey the law while criminals will continue to ignore said laws. So why is it so important to further restrict firearm ownership? The only real change i can think of is added background checks for private sales...everything else being proposed is simply pandering to an ignorant part of the population which believes that putting new laws on the books will somehow magically take away a criminal's ability to get weapons.
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