Good points, skid.
I am not going to join a board in which I have no interest, just to advocate for OC. I have enough places I want to be where I will advocate when the opportunity presents itself.
Physicists, like everyone else, have axioms and postulates deeply ingrained, that may be rational or may not be. Their thinking will be directed by those ingrained ideas. If, at the core of their beliefs, they hold that guns are dangerous and evil, their minds will be changed by rational, logical argument no more than anyone else's would be.
Einstein is often quoted as having said that God does not play dice with the universe and that insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different outcome. These were not a statement regarding religion and one defining insanity. They were arguments against quantum theory that revealed this genius' refusal to accept what went against his axioms.
Quantum theory holds that at the lowest levels, events are totally random and behave according to probability, making anything possible even at the levels we perceive. We don't walk through walls simply because some many quantum coins have to come up heads to make it happen that we almost surely will bang into the wall. However, it is possible, just hugely, grandly, enormously unlikely that we will successfully walk through a wall.
Einstein refused to accept quantum theory as a possible explanation of how our universe works because of his entrenched unproven and unprovable ideas. Even this man who shattered many of our axioms, making the concepts of relativity acceptable to other scientists, could not overcome some of his own.
This is a failing we all have, even physicists.
So, no, rational and logical arguments will not necessarily get through to them.