They are designed to kill, and in fact serve no other obvious purpose, unless your idea of a security blanket is one made of cold hard steel.
Whether this be a quail or a human being; possibly even to defend oneself from large flocks of extremely aggressive small birds, the design characteristics are clear.
They are designed to fire a projectile with sufficient momentum to attain the objective of killing the target organism.
You can argue target shooting and even clay pigeon shooting are sports, that just happens to be a fringe "benefit".
The whole development of designing a weapon that fires a projectile is so that it does so efficiently. Increasing the rate at which projectiles can be given sufficient momentum to meet design specifications, is once again by design. this is possibly due to birds swarming when eerie music is played.
If guns are designed to be fit for purpose, and if they are designed to kill people then the design must be to do so with the least effort to the operator.
If the only way you can remove a gun is from cold dead hands then one could argue the gun failed to meet its design specification if bought for self preservation, one could even argue that body armor might be a more cost effective solution.
Guns don't kill people when they are behind glass in a museum, unfortunately they seem to be often associated with human beings and their variable emotions, often these variables are difficult to predict before they become evident.
Perhaps guns are to protect yourself from your own government. Well seeing we throw hundreds of billions of dollars towards our own military and associated agencies this would appear to be illogical, how can the individual hope to compete? If the object is to protect ourselves from government surely it is more logical to downgrade the efficiency of our own military industrial complex?
Now if a piece of equipment is designed to kill surely it and its operator should be more strictly regulated than the piece of machinery designed for personal transport? Just a thought.
Now, those damn birds are congregating again.