Titled: USA Today, accidents, and "unsecured" guns

USA Today reports, with customary horror, that 1,700,000 children are in homes with unsecured guns, and that one-third of American homes have firearms in them. It goes on to say 1,400 "children and teens" are shot to death each year, and pumps for laws on gun storage (i.e., to criminalize failure to store in various ways). "It's a frightening problem," says Michael Barnes, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, a lobbying group that favors limiting gun ownership.

Let's look at the figures. Actually, in 2003 762 Americans of all ages died in gun accidents, according to the National Safety Council. USA Today gets a higher number by including teens (i.e., up to age 20) and gang-banger homicides, which are hardly revelant to safe gun storage.

Economist John Lott calculated the actual number of child gun accidental deaths, and found it was about 30 per year -- lower than the number that die of drowning in buckets.

If about ninety million Americans are in households with guns, and 1.7 million kids are in households with "unsecured" guns (however the study defines that), yet only 30 a year die in accidents .... doesn't it stand to reason that the vast, vast majority of gunowners, and even "unsecured" gun owners, are doing something right? (One useful comparison: lots of houses have "unsecured" chemicals and medicines as well -- and 17,000 people die annually of poisoning accidents). If anything, the figures suggest gun owners display a truly exceptional degree of personal responsibility.

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