You can buy a gun easily enough. However the people who actually do that tend to be enthusiasts who are well trained. To have a loaded gun on your person you need to be well trained in most states.
Again what do you base this on? I got a concealed carry permit after a 2 hour training class. During this class I had to fire a total of 6 rounds at a target ~15 feet away. I was not given any training on how to use the weapon, only a primer on the laws about when I can shoot someone. At no time did I have to demonstrate that I could safely bring my weapon from concealment to ready without shooting myself in the leg or a bystander. I can guarantee that of the 20 other people in my class, most of them did not meet any definition of "well trained".
"However the people who actually do that tend to be enthusiasts who are well trained" - based on what? You can buy a gun even if you have never fired one before.
> At no time did I have to demonstrate that I could safely bring my weapon from concealment to ready without shooting myself in the leg or a bystander.
It's not hard. If you pull the trigger, a bullet comes out (if the safety is off and if there is one in the chamber). So, simply don't pull the trigger until you are ready to fire a bullet. Most (if not all) people that buy guns, you included, understand this basic concept.
It's not like guns require massive amounts of experience to achieve proficiency. It's a simple tool, not a piano.
How do you store and carry your weapon safely? How do you transport it? Who has access to it and the ammunition? It is a simple tool that kills tens of thousands of people a year, the least we can do is treat it with at least the level of respect we give other potentially deadly tools (hardly a piano).
Car owners kill ~38,000 people a year. Guns kill ~15,000 a year (excluding suicides). There are roughly 20,000 suicides a year via firearm. I would argue that if you compared the number of cars driven on a daily basis in the us vs the number of guns fired, that guns cause far more deaths on a per use basis. Seems like Car owners are far more respectful of their 'weapon' on a per capita basis.
> How do you store and carry your weapon safely? How do you transport it? Who has access to it and the ammunition? It is a simple tool that kills tens of thousands of people a year
Unintentionally? I highly doubt that. I would guess the majority of the tens of thousands of deaths were the result of the gun owner intentionally pulling the trigger, not because they were bumbling around transporting it incorrectly, storing ammo incorrectly, etc.
According to this[1], only 500 people died in 2016 due to gun accidents. The rest were intentional.
500 accidents in a country with gun rights and a population of over 300M is nothing. You have like a 1 in a million chance of dying by a gun accident. Even lower if you don't own or use guns. It's a non-problem.
My uncle told me a story about when he was deployed to Afghanistan there was a designated area by the mess hall you were supposed to use to ensure your sidearm chamber was clear. Every once in a while, there was an accidental discharge and an officer would be seen over there sheepishly holstering their sidearm. My uncle pointed out that it wasn't required that you had to pull the trigger, just that you had to ensure the chamber was empty. My uncle said he never had a single accidental discharge in the 2 years he was there because he simply never pulled the trigger. If you don't pull the trigger, no bullets come out.
So soldiers trained by the US military would sometimes make mistakes with their weapon resulting in a discharge they were not expecting? Seems like perhaps its not so simple a tool after all...
That's not true. To go from a novice with absolutely no experience with guns to a person with a concealed carry license took one day of a seminar in a southern east coast state.
