But just a nibble.

About half of all Americans own a gun. Most of those are hand guns. About 5% of the population own all the assault rifles in America. Marketing manipulation as you say is quite simple since there are so many guns it is easy to scare people into wanting one for protection. It doesn't even take marketing. They just need to watch the news.

Cars are not in the same category as guns. Yes people die in car accidents but people died falling off horses too. The advent of the automobile represented a massive transportation revolution in the world. I wrote a paper about the auto industry in college and I know I've talked about this before, but let me summarize. Before the automobile 90% of the world's population never travelled more than 25 miles from where they were born. This made them dependent on whomever ran the local factory or mine or monopoly business. The car freed the human race from this condition as it created mobility of labor on a scale that never existed throughout human history. This meant higher wages and better standards of living for people since businesses now had to compete much more for their labor. Also, it is in the modern car driving households that women have acheived near equal social status. In effect, cars are one of the greatest forces ever created for individual human freedom. But as market economics teaches, nothing is ever acheived without a cost. People die in car accidents. Pollution has threatened our health and even our civilization. Modern cities dedicate nearly half their total real estate to the automobile. Self driving electric cars may help mitigate the first two problems.