There are better ways of protecting oneself than with guns.
I'm schooled in martial arts, Tae Kwon Do to be exact, but having dealt with seeing the result of violent crimes I can tell you now that a firearm is perhaps one of the most effective means of self defense, utilized correctly. I can disarm someone with a decent probability of not being hurt, but would I rather take a 50% chance with my martial arts or a 80% with my Beretta? And that's assuming the attacking party doesn't have a pistol themselves.
Guns too often get in the wrong hands (i.e. the hands of children),
Which is a crime, in my country, with serious penalities. You are criminally liable for ensuring that your firearms are not accessible by minors.
not to mention all the accidents that can happen with them,
An accident implies no one is at fault. Technically, "accidents" do not include incidents where someone is at fault, i.e., negligent: where someone fails to take reasonable precautions in the circumstances. I've never heard of a gun going off, in this day and age, unless someone loaded it and pulled the trigger.
and the fact that they can backfire on you.
I've fired several pistols, taken many apart and put them back together to see how they're engineered, and never heard of one "backfiring". I've heard of cars backfiring, mind you, due to improper timing and stoichiometry. The way that the modern firearm is engineered actually makes it practically impossible for the user to be injured, assuming they wield it properly. This isn't including 'Saturday Night Specials', also known as 'Junk Guns'. Those are the Ford Pinto's of firearms ;p
It's not about freedom; it's about safety.
It's not about safety, it's about liability for one's actions. If I get drunk "accidentally", puts the keys in my ignition "accidentally", drive down the road "accidentally" and hit a bus full of children by "accident", who do you blame? Me, or the car? Same goes for firearms in my mind. If you're not responsible enough to know how to handle one (the first rule that anyone is taught is to ensure yourself that it's unloaded, rendering it completely impotent by default), they you shouldn't be handling one. Simple as that. If you do something wrong, it's the product of your own negligence.
And just as I despise people blaming video games, movies and music for their children's actions, I hate people not taking responsibility for firearms mishaps. If your child gets a hold of your gun and hurts themselves or someone else, and you didn't have the pistol locked up,
you're going to prison, and rightfully so.
As for the 'backfire' issue, I'd like to see your support of that claim. The only such claim I know of, in modern times, was a design flaw on the Beretta 92 series about two decades ago wherein a couple of pistols out of thousands had their slides come off and hit the person shooting them in the face. Since that was addressed and remedied from an engineering standpoint, no such incidents have occurred. I think the most serious injury from that was someone having a tooth knocked out.
-Corey