[ctdonath]

A casual glance at the deplorable accidental and unintentional discharge rates in the US statistics should make it immediately clear that

...there isn't a substantial problem therewith. Not zero, of course, but by your line of reasoning cars should be outlawed immediately because of the actual accidental & unintentional harm rates therewith ... and the same issue with guns being orders of magnitude less.

The problem isn't accidental casualties (those are in fact quite rare). The problem is people willing to cause grave harm to others, a group which does not include a vast number of people who are not willing to cause grave harm to others save for stopping the former from doing so - but whom you are quick to lump together. Break down US murder rates, and you'll find the bulk of the problem firmly within certain subgroups; disarming other US subgroups (as you advocate) won't solve the problem, as up-arming those groups has decreased murder rates in their areas.

[barrkel]

by your line of reasoning cars should be outlawed immediately

Cars have lots of valuable uses. The valuable uses of guns are a lot fewer.

[ctdonath]

Preserving innocent life against those who would take or subjugate it is very valuable.

Per the rhetoric I regularly encounter, the value of cars should be irrelevant to the discussion due to the loss of life thereto.

[hga]

The minimum generally accepted death toll of subjects (not citizens because, some how, some way they were disarmed first) killed by their own government is 100 million in the 20th Century. My personal guess is a quarter billion, based on different scoring of the Communists who took over China (that's an additional 60 million minimum) and how much worse it turns out to be when one of these regimes is overturned enough that people are able to poke around.

With stakes that great, a well armed citizenry is cheap insurance.

[Osiris]

Cars kill tens of thousands of people a year. Human drivers should absolutely be outlawed, as soon as the technology is feasible to do so.

[ctdonath]

Of under-discussed note: those fatalities are almost exclusively accidental. That vs (per current topic) nearly all gun-related fatalities (similar number) being deliberate. Of the two, seems the former is a grossly deficient product more worthy of prohibition; absent the latter, those choosing the action will just find some other tool.

[ctdonath]

In review, I wasn't clear: accidental deaths with guns numbers in the low hundreds, if that high. Tragic, yes, every one of them, but so are falls down stairs and swimming pool drownings (comparable numbers).