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Any useful tool will be used well by many and misused by some.

The knee jerk reaction of the thought impaired is to immediately demand legislation to ban the object, which some opine would be worthwhile "if just one life was saved." If they had their way, we'd all soon be living naked in rubber padded isolation cells so we wouldn't get access to things we might use to hurt ourselves or others.

What this approach overlooks, of course, is that the benefits of proper use of the object would be lost as well if the tool was removed from common use. In the case of firearms, the 2.5 million annual civilian uses to stop crimes would be turned into 2.5 million additional successful crimes - hardly a benefit in my book.

If you encounter someone who insists on pursuing this line of reasoning, ask him apply it to motor vehicles, which are routinely and repeatedly misused by idiots and criminals to commit felonies, drive drunk, and kill mutliple people in single incidents of reckless or intoxicated driving. They are the instruments of death in tens of thousands of deaths annually. By banning these engines of destruction, surely we could save some lives. Of course, walking to work would be a little inconvenient, and we'd have to go back to dragging grocery carts to get the goods home from the supermarket. Trips to the ER would take a little longer without ambulances, and fire department response would be a little slower without trucks. There are a couple of other minor drawbacks I'm sure you could point out as well to help folks see the wisdom of cost / benefit analysis.

In my book, the best word on this subject as it relates to guns came from the late Col. Jeff Cooper, who stated that no gun could be made foolproof. His solution was that fools should keep their hands off machinery.

Another logical fallacy to watch out for and point out when it occurs is the statement that someone was killed "by" a gun / assault rifle / semiautomatic pistol, etc. That's simply not true. The killing was done by a person who used a gun to commit the crime. The distinction is important because the first case implies that the gun itself was at fault, which would give credence to efforts to ban the tool. The second places the responsibility for the act on the person who actually caused it.

The muddy thinking here can be highlighted once again by applying the same logic to motor vehicles and using a news story to observe that a pedestrian was killed by a Chevy Tahoe SUV with an automatic transmission, and suggesting that SUV's with automatic transmissions should be banned because they cause more collision damage than Kia subcompacts and they're easier for alcoholics to operate when they're drunk than standard transmissions are. The fact is that the pedestrian was killed by a driver who used a motor vehicle to commit the act, and the brand of the vehicle and style of transmission are irrelevant to causation.