> something that is less deadly than hunting accidents,

Is this a lazy figure of speech?

US police have recently been killing ~ 1,100 people in the US per year.

* https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...

Near as I can tell that's more than a decades worth of hunting fatalities in the US.

  IHEA published a report of 79 fatal hunting-related accidents in 2001. Twenty-nine fatalities resulted from hunters’ failures to identify targets; 11 resulted from hunters’ inability to see victims; 10 resulted from hunters firing while swinging on game (the hunter follows a moving target with their firearm).

( Not a great source, it has some obvious errors but largely meshes with other sources, I admit I've not found a good comprehensive report on the overall state of US hunting acidents, I did look at a several good state summaries )