While this is a tragedy, it's about the victim not being a responsible gun owner and has nothing to do with guns.
Everyone knows that guns (like cars) are dangerous.
The main difference is that the primary purpose of guns is to shoot and kill (a person or an animal). A car can be dangerous, but generally not if it's used properly. A gun is only not dangerous if it's not being used at all.
In this day and age, guns are necessary insofar as a way for law abiding citizens to protect themselves as well as their family.
There is no evidence that gun ownership in anyway allows you to protect your family any more effectively than other means (such as having an effective legal system).
I have an idea. Why don't we count up the lives SAVED by guns (intruders, rapists, murderers) or that could have been saved had the victim had a gun
and compare that to the number of accidental shootings
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I think this would be very difficult to do for several reasons:
a) it's a counter factual analysis, which are notoriously unreliable as it's dependent on a lot of assumptions being made.
b) a person who had a gun might be more hasty in attributing their successful resistance to, say, a rapist through having a gun, partly because a person with a gun would likely be pro-guns in the first place, and partly because we like to feel that our actions give us control over our circumstances.
c) I don't think there are any reliable statistics on this.
It's far better to compare, say, whether the US has a lower rate of murder, rape, etc. than comparative countries with lower or similar gun ownership. You would expect that if your theory is true, a sufficient number of crimes would be prevented (either directly through the use of a firearm or indirectly through the possibility of someone having a gun being a deterrent) to be comparable. But this isn't the case
