Do Guns Make Us Safer?

Robert VerBruggen at National Review Online offers a reply to my CNN column on guns. I'll respond to Robert more fully later today, but in the interim, here's an appetizer portion of an answer to Robert's claim that thousands of gun accidents per year (more than 600 of them fatal!) are hardly worth bothering about:
From yesterday's Utica (NY) Post-Despatch:
A 79-year-old Florida man accidentally shot himself inside the Super 8 motel in North Utica when he threw his jacket on top of the gun Monday afternoon, police said.
More than a half dozen police vehicles swarmed the North Genesee Street motel shortly after 4:30 p.m., with several officers darting up the stairs and into the lobby with their guns drawn after the gunshot was initially reported.
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About 20 minutes later, the victim – Kenneth Loope, of Palm Bay, Fla. – was wheeled out on a stretcher and taken away by ambulance to be treated at a local hospital.
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The gunshot wound is not considered life-threatening, police said.
If these devices were lawnmowers or ladders, nobody would tolerate the havoc they inflict. But the most dangerous consumer product of them all is the one that is regulated least. Crazy.
H/T Joshua Chavers)
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