In a previous incarnation in the mid-1970s I was a reporter on the New York Post, whose late shift was at that time enlivened by an average of eight murders a night. For a young hack fresh from the UK, it was an eye-opener. A bar-room argument which in the UK might end with a fat lip had a completely different outcome if one or more drunks was armed. I recall a man who awoke to find someone trying to break into his trailer late at night, and who fired nine shots through the door - even had to reload the gun - before finding out he'd killed his son.
New York is much more bucolic now and the murder rate across the US has fallen dramatically, but Crabette's fatuous and misleading figure of 1,500 accidental gun deaths needs to be put into perspective. You have to add to that some 24,000 non-accidental gun deaths annually - the equivalent of a Vietnam War every two years.
The slogan of the NRA, then as now, was "Guns don't kill people, people kill people." That too is crap. People don't kill people, guns do, and not all the jingoistic self-justification in America is going to change that fact.
The only good reason I was ever given for maintaining the status quo was that 25,000 deaths a year was a small price to pay for keeping the meddlers' hands off the Constitution.
What's this got to do with helicopters?