There are 700 accidental deaths in the US due to guns, most of them are children. Almost 200,000 non-fatal injuries due to guns, many of them requiring ER trauma visits. guns for hunting should be kept in hunting lodges or shooting ranges, not in homes.
There are an average of almost 34,000 deaths per year in auto accidents and over 3 MILLION injuries many of them requiring ER visits. Obviously automobiles should be kept in the garage.
What you say is true, but the founding fathers also considered gun ownership to be imperative for personal protection. Thomas Jefferson said, âLaws that forbid the carrying of arms disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes...Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.â Esteemed liberal Consitutional law professor Sanford Levinson (who has degrees from Yale, Harvard and Stanford and is personally against gun ownership) argues that the founders clearly wrote the Constitution with the intent to give individuals the right to keep and bear arms. He wrote, "The structure of the Second Amendment within the Bill of Rights proves that the right to bear arms is an individual right, rather than a collective one. The collective rights idea that the Second Amendment can only be viewed in terms of state or federal power ignores the implication that might be drawn from the Second, Ninth, and Tenth Amendments: the citizenry itself can be viewed as an important third component of republican governance as far as it stands ready to defend republican liberty against the depredations of the other two structures, however futile that might appear as a practical matter." Sanford Levinson, The Embarrassing Second Amendment, 99 YALE L.J. 637, 651 (1989).
Over 13,000 people died falling and over 3,000 died drowning (341 in bathtubs). http://danger.mongabay.com/injury_death.htm Over 500 people a year in the US get hit by lighting, and about 50 get killed. The solution to that problem was given to us by the great professional golfer, Lee Trevino, who was himself hit by lightning. He said that if there's lightning just hold up a 1-iron... "Because not even God can hit a 1-iron."
Over 1 million people die in the US every year from cardiovascular disease or heart disease. Obviously red meat should be illegal.
I think you and I both know these are silly arguments about red meat and cars. We do have very strict laws protecting children in autos. Children can't sit in the front seat and all states require child seats. Yet there are No laws that protect children in homes where parents decide to keep guns. I have great memories of going hunting with my father, but as a 7 year old kid sure enough I found his hunting rifles and would pretend play. Thank goodness I never found the cartridges. Every year 700 people, mostly children die of gun shot wounds and thousands others are seriously injuried. Guns don't belong in homes.