OK. I've got it now, kwik.
And classes in rhetoric should be mandatory for posters before they are allowed to use logical fallacies...
Hey..... this is fun!
Does the fact that it's rhetoric make it wrong? No.
How about something a little closer. Do I need mandatory training to operate a kitchen knife? A katana? A chainsaw? The answers are no again, yet you can indeed kill someone (or yourself) with all three quite easily. I could argue that the "benifit to society" would be fairly strong for mandatory training with a knife or a chainsaw. Getting someone to wear kevlar chaps and safety glasses while using their chainsaws would put less burden on emergency rooms and insurance.
One could also argue that speech poses a greater danger than firearms, yet as kwik said, we don't regulate it via prior restraint. Speech can incite riots, hate crimes, and bring whole countries into war yet it's a freedom that we hold dear. With speach, at least, we recognize that with the right comes a responsibility. If it's not exercised responsibly, there should be consequences. That's no different in theory than the responsibility each individual has to use his RKBA in a responsible manner.
This all boils down to liberty vs. security. Some people; like you Hank, think that your security or society's security (are you a collectivist?) is more important than individual liberty at least in the case of RKBA. Most of us disagree. It is the only one of our enumerated rights, that for some reason, is saddled with prior restraint. That's even before any mandatory training requirments which would burden it with more prior restraint.
Even if it did collectively make society a tiny bit safer (of which there is no proof what so ever) I would still disagree with prior restraint on the right. Why? No matter how much a person lacks training he or she should be able to pick up the best tool availlable for self defense. They should never need your permission or governments permission to do so.
Furthermore, prior restraint puts more power back into the governments hands and in the case of RKBA this is specifically bad juju. There was a resaon the founders used the term "shall not be infringed", judicial activism and unconstitutional laws be damned. The english BoR used the term "as allowed by law". If they would have intended our goverment to have any power over RKBA at all, they would have used similar language. Believe me, they were quite familiar with the english bill of rights and Blackstone.
All of that being said, most of us have training. Most anyone who buys a firearm will electively get the training they require. Lastly, training should be encouraged, as it used to be even by the government in programs like the CMP.
Part of a free society is trusting your fellow citizen to do the right thing. Liberty can be scary. I've got to trust my fellow citizens to not swerve into my lane while I'm driving down the road. Most of us never give that a second thought. We've got to trust them to do the right thing with their firearms as well. I'll take a little scary over living in a perfectly safe cage for the rest of my life.