Cars are FAR more fatal, will, if you really want to discuss the dangers of weapons.
The National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (part of the CDC) has a very neat tool which allows you to break injuries and deaths down numerically, and generate tables like: "10 Leading Causes of Injury Deaths, United States
2005, All Races, Both Sexes". I prefer the raw numbers to statistics like "you're twice as likely to die in a car accident than as the result of a firearm", because, although true, it tends to be misleading without the original data.
Seeing the actual numbers is pretty interesting.
I made one for illustrative purposes, and highlighted what we're talking about in red:
I think if you're really concerned about unnecessary deaths in the United States, it would be time and money MUCH better spent working on number one killer, in some cases doubling the amount of deaths by firearm.
Check it out here:
http://webappa.cdc.gov/sasweb/ncipc/leadcaus10.html
A quick number crunch with my calculator; If I include suicide AND homicide by firearm, men and women between the ages of 5 and 34
were one and a half times (1.4886) more likely to die in a car accident than as the result of a firearm in 2005.
560+763+10657+7047=19027
44+143+4499+3780+8466 + (84 + 1962 + 2269 + 4315) = 12781
19027 / 12781 = 1.488694
If you don't include suicide, they're
2.2476 times more likely to die as a result of a car accident than at the hands of someone else's firearm.
In the finite economy in which we live, should we spend more money on preventing death by vehicle, or preventing death by firearm? The math here is pretty simple. To drive the point further, which are you more worried about? Being killed by a man with a gun, or being killed by a car? You
should be more worried about the car, as it is more than twice as likely to kill you. If you're more worried about the gunman, it's sure not based on the numbers.