The founders weren't real worried about personal safety. The 2nd Amendment is in there as a check on government authority, plain and simple. It's our insurance policy against tyranny and like all insurance it has costs. ~13K murders per year, as well as a lot of suicides that wouldn't have happened had a quick and painless death been a bit farther away.
IMO, the question is always whether or not that insurance policy is worth it. If we say armed insurrection is occasionally justifiable and we say governments are prone to eventually getting out of control, it's a nice numbers game. Someone must have done these calculations before, but back of the envelope stuff is fun...
Conservatively say about 15,000 people die per year because of firearms. The EPA puts a value of about $6.9M on the life of an american, so that's around a hundred billion dollars of human life wasted each year. That's the cost of the premium to maintain our ability to violently overthrow the government. Of course, it's really much less because the people getting killed by guns tend to be in the bottom 20% of society, and they actually have negative net worth. But we'll stick with the $6.9M average value.
Figure there's currently about a trillion bucks concentrated in the hands of a few, ah, hell, let's just call them oligarchs. It's probably way more, but let's just go after the top half a percent.
A good revolution, costing us maybe half a million american lives (kinda assuming the army quickly joined The People), isn't a good bet right now. That's about $3T in dead. We only get that trillion bucks of wealth from the rich people. We don't want to take a loss on this.
But fast forward a few decades! At some point, the average value of an american life drops some more (it dropped a million dollars in the five years leading up to 2008!) or merely stagnates. Meanwhile, the oligarchs gain many more trillions in net worth. Their relative net worth has been rising almost exponentially. That exponential growth will eventually outpace the cumulative cost of our annual 'insurance premium' and the cost of the revolution combined. That's the time to strike! Man, if you keep the death toll below projected levels, someone stands to make a hell of a margin on this.
Best part of this type of plan is that appeals to conservatives who like to look for a good ROI and to the far left liberals who want some kind of communist revolution. Anyway, I say gun ownership stays. I'd like to keep that revenue stream open for future generations.
At some point we may need to pay back the Chinese and this could be the easiest way to do it given how hard it is to raise taxes and cut spending.