If you're complaining about taking a 7 hour course to learn how to properly handle a gun, you don't deserve to own/hold/use one. A gun is a responsibility, not a right. It's a weapon, not a toy, not a possession, just a tool designed for one thing only: kill things.
Also, the odds of dying in a plane crash is less than dying to a gun. More gun-related deaths happen every year in America than deaths from plane crashes in the entire world. You have the numbers in the wrong order.
While there's little concrete proof that less guns result in less crime, as no proper large scale removal of guns from circulation has been implemented, there is definitely a culture of violence which results in more gun deaths in America than any other place in the world. Even countries with similar gun ownership rates have less gun-related murders and accidents than America, proportionally.
In addition, using a gun to protect yourself is proven to be highly ineffective unless you're not taken off guard, which you will be as most competent criminals will try to assault you from behind or unpredictably. There's a general rule with guns that if somebody comes at you with a knife from 25 feet away, the average person will not be able to draw their gun in time to defend themselves from the knife. And that's assuming they come at you with a knife. If you have a gun, it means it's just as easy for the criminal to get the gun as well. At 25 feet, if they come at you with a gun, you so much as twitch and they'll blow a hole through you.
Finally, if stupid people do stupid things, why would you want ready access to destructive implements available to everybody? That's just asking for trouble. "Self-defense" is a stupid reason to own a gun because most people in their lifetime will never actually be in a situation of "self-defense." Getting a gun before you have any concrete reasoning to believe you need "self-defense" is getting a solution, then looking for the problem. Again, these are weapons, tools designed to kill. Inherently, something designed to kill is better suited to assault somebody, rather than defend somebody.
Also, the majority of guns used for violent crime were either obtained legally by the perpetrator, or were legally owned but then stolen. The thought that criminals will be the only people who have guns if guns were banned is a preposterous statement, since the majority of guns that criminals own were at one point legal. Removing the legal firearms from circulation reduces access to firearms for illegal purposes.
Guns are bad, they are designed BY people to KILL PEOPLE for the most part, when you raise the bar on what is acceptable as reasonable force in order to defend your person and your home from attack it opens a MASSIVE can of worms that you can never really close again.
But yes, guns are bad. No exceptions.