Guns appear in both my novels, but in both cases I was intentional about where they appear and what they mean.
Latent Defects is a mystery and Whaleshark is a hacker heist somewhere in the general cyberpunk area, so I know most readers are likely to expect and not necessarily be alarmed by guns. I wanted to subvert that expectation a little.
In Whaleshark, gun control has gotten much stricter in the U.S., so one character having a gun quickly tells us that he's operating outside the law and has some shady connections. The presence of the gun is extremely threatening. All interactions other characters have with the gun owner are haunted with the threat of violence and understanding that he is an unsafe person.
Latent Defects is set in the U.S. in the 1980s, where there certainly were guns and gun violence, but the gun doesn't show up until things have seriously spiraled out of control. The main character, a private detective, is not used to being threatened with a gun or shot at, because that doesn't, in fact, happen that often when your work mainly involves light stalking and long-distance photography to find proof of insurance fraud or marital infidelity. The narrative positions the antagonist buying a gun and openly displaying it as a major escalation and a sign that his wife (who hired the detective) is in significantly more danger of violence than before. Like, obviously "he bought a gun" is generally shorthand for "he plans or expects do do violence", but I'm trying, hopefully successfully, to make that feel the way it would to me if a man I knew did that (unhinged, chilling) and not the way it does in a lot of stories in this genre (a bit scary, but familiar and kind of normal).
Idk. Perhaps I am being naive, or disregarding genre conventions in a way that is not going to hit for most readers, but I do think it's possible to make guns feel scary again.