Andrew,
During the late 80's and mid 90's, florida had a very violent reputation, and it deserved it. People living there poked fun at the reputation with simple things like bumper-stickers that read "Don't call it Tourist Season if we can't shoot em!".
During the latter part of the nineties, the crime rate (particularly violent crimes) dropped dramatically, with some categories dropping more than 50% over a four year period. There has been much debate on why this occurred, but the two most discussed reasons were a better economy and forcing convicts to serve 80% of their prison term. As a matter of fact, I have *never* heard until today the argument that concealed weapons were in fact a large contributor to the drop, and I don't buy it. Sorry.
Regarding statistics, I try not to get hung up on them. But when I hear things like "95% of guns are never used to hurt anyone" (or whatever stat you want to quote), I don't think about that 95%, I think about that 5% whose lives are destroyed or changed because of it. I don't know if it makes sense to you, but getting tied up in the numbers game loses sight of the victim.
Oh, and I would never compare a gun to a car or anything else. A car's primary purpose is transportation, whereas a gun's primary purpose is to threaten, intimidate, and kill. Just because by using either you may end up dead is not a valid basis to compare them. For instance, you could also die by eating food(choking), and by that logic you would classify food in the same category as guns, and that doesn't make sense. So lets leave guns in their category (weapons), cars in their category (transportation), and food in its category (substance). If you actually start eating your guns, then we can arrange the categories accordingly.
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