Yes, car deaths and gun deaths are quite similar in magnitude (if you lump together accidents and suicides along with murders).

An argument that I've made in the past is that it's relatively easy to reduce your chance of getting killed with a gun: seek medical attention if you become depressed (greatly reduces risk of suicide), and avoid doing business with criminals (mainly, don't buy or sell illegal drugs and don't be a prostitute). Do these things and your risk of being killed with a gun drops down to levels comparable to other occasional hazards, like being struck by lightning or gored by a bull.

Surely making the country safer for drivers and pedestrians is as important is gun control.

As I say, it's an argument I've made in the past, even though I recognize that tactically it's a dead loser—because cars aren't scary in the way that guns are. But it's more than that: There is a strong, multi-pronged effort to make cars safer, to make roadways safer, to get dangerous drivers off the road, etc. These efforts have been highly effective, reducing roadway deaths by close to half in my lifetime.

If there were anything close to that sort of effort applied to firearms, we'd have all sorts of gun control going on by now. There'd be guns that could only be fired by the owner, guns that called the police automatically when they were fired, gun inspection regimes, mandatory testing for gun shooters, mandatory gun-owner liability insurance, etc.

Most of those ideas have serious problems when applied to firearms, but they'd be what was going on if people applied the same logic to gun deaths that they apply to car deaths.