CPT Tripss
Registered
- Joined
- Feb 26, 2006
Along those lines, I also would encourage people to not be afraid of law-abiding citizens with guns, simply based off stories of irresponsible gun owners. According to the CDC, there were 14,000 accidental shootings in 2010. Even if all 14k were done with a gun owned by concealed carry holders (7 million), that's .2 percent of that population.
Since there are 300 million firearms owned by civilians in 2010, then that accident rate represents less than .005 percent of the gun population.
Since a current survey shows 35 percent of Americans admit to owning firearms, that means a little over 1.10 million own firearms, then the accident rate represents about .013 percent of gun owners.
Since current homicide and suicide rates are comparable to the accident rate, their percentages would be, too.
Haha. Well, Disney doesn't allow weapons of any kind in the parks, so there ya go.
This entire notion you mentioned all stems from a 1986 study called "Protection or Peril? An Analysis of Firearm-Related Deaths in the Home," by Arthur Kellerman. In it, he concludes "handguns are 43 times more likely to kill a family member than a criminal."
The reason no one uses his study anymore is because, when peers reviewed it, they noticed Kellerman estimated the rate of gun ownership based on facts from two cities, and didn't include situations where intruders were frightened away by the sight of a gun, or avoided a home they knew had guns.
Of the two cities he looked at, he noted 43 cases of a handgun being used on a family member inside the home. What he didn't note, was 37 of them were suicides, and the other deaths involved criminal activity between family members.
Yet, somehow he reached the conclusion that guns in the house are 43 times more likely to kill a family member than a criminal.
Oy vey.
It's not the FBI I'm refuting. It's the VPC, since they're an anti-gun lobbying group. I don't know how else to say it to make it more clear for you.
Are you as loose with the rest of your numbers as you are with your decimal points?