History seems to disagree with your basic premise. There are entire classes of security vulnerabilities eliminated by high level language features. (A trivial example: buffer overflows are a non-issue with runtime bounds checking.)

In theory, it's possible to write bug-free code in C or assembly. In practice, it just doesn't happen. The rule of "worse is better" ensures that the rare projects that put in the necessary effort to manually eliminate the bugs that HLLs catch automatically will get steamrolled by projects that don't (witness the adoption rates of Linux versus OpenBSD).

That said: I think that tool developers have only scratched the surface of the possibilities for compile time checks. I'm always amazed how little the industry has learned from projects like Ada. There's an opportunity in there somewhere to have that cake and eat it too.