Gun Safety Rules
 

Like those found here.

Would they be part of the Guns skill or would they be an SOP Perk (Power-Ups 2 p.15)?

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

Guns skill. Something very similar to those rules are included at the front of firearm instruction manuals sold in the US, along with state-specific warnings, and most firearm instructors will give a brief lecture summarizing those points before letting a new shooter touch a firearm.

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

OTOH, if you learn your skill from your time as a drug dealer, you will presumably not learn them. I'm leaning towards SOP myself, but I wanted to ask the hivemind.

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

Definitely Guns. People who "learn" shooting as drug dealers almost invariably shoot at default skill.

Cheers

HANS

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

Treat, never, keep, keep.

Definitely part of the Guns skill.

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

Would we have all the accidents if it was part of Guns skill?

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

As Hans suggested upthread, it's pretty likely that the people having accidents don't have points in Guns, they're rolling against a default.

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

Military personnel have negligent discharges all the time. Learning rules doesn't prevent 100% of accidents. You could have a shooters make an IQ-based Guns roll daily or weekly or somesuch, failure means a safety violation, critical failure is a negligent discharge. Laziness, Absent-Minded, and so on ought to penalize the roll as well as sleep deprivation and so on.

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

I'd probably just incorporate it into their Job roll. The consensus seems to be that it's part of Guns skill.

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

Sure we would.

The vast majority of accidents are either:

1. Critical failures from someone rolling against Guns, or
2. Someone using Guns at default

And many, many, many criminals use Guns at default. Just from a game mechanic perspective, how many criminals do you know that get 200+ hours of practice with guns? Let's say that a typical criminal gets in a gunfight every month (which is actually ridiculously frequent; in reality, it might happen twice a year, even to an inner-city drug dealer). The average gun fight lasts a lot less than a minute, but let's pretend it's a full minute to be even more generous. That still means that it would take said criminal 1,000 years to acquire a single point of Guns. :)

In real life, people with Guns skill have trained in it. They spend several hours at a time on a range, and go back week after week; and if they really care, they work under the tutelage of a trained instructor. Or they grew up with hunting parents, who taught them how to use a gun at a young age, and have been shooting for a few decades. Either way, we're talking about a combination of regular use, long hours of use at a time, and actual training.

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

I'd say someone could learn how to shoot without being familiar with safety rules, and someone could just outright ignore some (or all) of them. The grand total of 1 time* I've actually fired a weapon, I noticed the other people - including a guy who had previously been in the military - tended to ignore the "finger off the trigger" bit (although they did keep the others in mind), despite them being better shots than me (so they probably weren't working off default).

Maybe call it a Quirk: Doesn't Follow Gun Safety, with the effect that you have an increased chance of accidental discharge. The Perk version (SOP: Gun Safety) would mean you essentially never have an accidental discharge.

*OK, technically I shot a crappy .22 that couldn't hit the broadside of a barn once when I was somewhere around 12 years old. I don't really count that, though.

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

I knew a Marine who rested the muzzle of his M4 on his boot while he did a function check. And he forgot to take the mag out before doing so. Idiot.

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

ITYM "Incompetence: Guns"

Pretty much a non-starter as far as adventurers are concerned, but there are plenty of people who have it in real life.

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

But no-one who is at all a good shot has it in real life. Whereas there's no actual incompatibility between being able to shoot well and being utterly negligent of firearm safety. Which was the entire point.

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

A compromise? Knowledge of the Rules are part of the Guns skill. Being able to say to the GM at any time "No, because I follow the Rules" and smirk, and get away with it, requires a Perk.

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

It seems expensive to add something like that. As someone else said, easier to just consider it part of the Guns skill and most failures to be the results of disadvantages like Laziness, Absent-Mindedness, etc or a side effect of blown Will rolls (like a fright check).

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

I would say that most failures result from the IQ-based guns role being penalized by intoxication. Take a look at how many gun-accidents involve alcohol.

That said, I can see no reason to ban a Standard Operating Procedure perk for proper gun safety.

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

I believe "Pants Positive Safety, " which pretty much allows some pretty egregious behavior violating these rules, is a Gun Fu perk. SOP Gun Safety Fanatic seems perfectly acceptable to me, and between High Tech, Gun Fu, and the forthcoming Tactical Shooting, what that means for the characters (when you need a Ready action, when you need a DX or IQ based Guns roll to go from not violating rules to ready to shoot) should be pretty clear.

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

Do you know of any stats on what percentage of shootings are under the influence of alcohol? I've been trying to find them and had no luck.

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

I would never require a perk for this. The gun safety rules are the most basic, most simple measures you adhere to when employing a dangerous tool like a firearm. Really, that's like "Don't touch the flame." I know very well that people still manage to hurt others and themselves in clear violation of the rules -- but people also manage to burn themselves, fall down the stairs, and do any number of other stupid things.

Making this a perk results in perk inflation, especially in light of books like Tactical Shooting, which feature so many other perks with real utility. I can see no good coming out of characters being charged points for nuisance stuff like this when they can get, for the same point, a Concealed Carry Permit, proficiency in complicated Battle Drills, or access to cheaper gear -- or, indeed, a SOP that actually helps them survive.

This is a part of Guns skill. In fact, I write in Tactical Shooting that safe operation of the gun is part of Guns skill.

Cheers

HANS

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

I can't find anything either, sorry. I guess I was just remembering several anecdotes of people doing stupid things with guns while drinking.

I didn't mean to make unfounded assumptions, but I'd frankly be surprised if a large percentage of accidental shootings related to negligent gun handling didn't also involve drugs or alcohol.

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

I bow in the presence of a master. I think that's as close to Word of God as we're going to get.

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

No, I'm not challenging your statements. I've just been making the same assumption but unable to find actual statistics on it for some time, and it's been annoying me.

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

I think what Doug is saying that a perk will get you immunity to negligent discharges even if you roll a critical failure.

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

I think that would be reasonable, as long as it's phrased to make it clear why it's worth the point. This needs justification to be given an extra cost, after all. Bundling in some minor, related benefits would help. Something like this might work:

SOP (Gun Safety Fanatic)

You never stop thinking about firearm accidents. You always know where your barrel is pointing, you never let the hammer slip, you're especially mindful not to snag your trigger on clothing, etc. In game, no firearm you're using will ever discharge accidentally, even on a critical failure. As you've specifically practiced how to quickly and safely lower a hammer and thumb a safety, you may do either as a free action, no roll required; see Conditions of Readiness (Tactical Shooting, p. 8) for more.

The last bit overlaps with Lightning Fingers, but it also follows logically from the first bit. That is, the consequence of dropping a hammer too quickly is an accidental discharge -- so if you're immune to that, your character should be able to drop the hammer as fast as he likes! (PS: This paragraph will make a lot more sense once y'all have read Tactical Shooting, sorry!)

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

Excellent. I'll just add that haranguing everybody else about gun safety can easily lead to an Odious Personal Habit.

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

Yeah, it's gotta be worth the point, obviously. Pants Positive Safety gives you immunity to one kind of deliberate stupidity; a properly costed Perk should give you immunity to all kinds of negligent stupidity, of the "don't even bother rolling" kind.

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

FWIW, I'd charge a point if a character wanted to be completely immune to accidently burning themselves or falling down stairs.

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

Meh, if everyone else is being safe, yes.

Being anal retentive about safety around other people that are usually safe, with one or more people being lackadaisical is not going to annoy the serious shooters.

I took away one of my Marine's rounds for the duration of the war because he was wandering around with a round in the chamber when he wasn't supposed to be. No one thought I was out of line.

Gun Safety Problems --
 

I'm no expert (although I've almost been shot twice -- by negligence) but IMHO there are two groups that are especially dangerous with firearms.

1.) The rookies who don't know the rules;

2.) Some of the old hands, who think they're so experienced that the rules don't apply. Two relatives of mine were shot (not fatally, thankfully) by this latter group.

If you follow the rules of firearms' safety religiously you will NOT shoot anyone. If you don't you well might.

So, for GURPS, you can have some guy with about 8 points in Guns still make a mistake (see #2 above.)

Re: Gun Safety Problems --
 

Firstly, very few real life shooters can justify 8 points (1600 hours of instruction, or 6400 of OJT). Secondly this is easily the result of a critical failure.

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

Yeah, sorry, my post wasn't really meant as a reply to Doug anyway. We mustn't mix this up, though:

1. Basic gun safety rules are part of Guns. Knowledge of the skill implies that you know how to safely handle the things, but of course you can still make mistakes.
2. SOP (Gun Safety Fanatic) means you go above and beyond, always making sure you adhere to the rules, effectively preventing you from making mistakes.
3. Pants Positive Safety (which is of course cinematic) means you habitually break the rules but don't get penalised for it.

My main concern is that there is no

0. SOP (Gun Safety Rules). Unless you have this, you don't know the safety rules and often make mistakes that get you or other people hurt.

There are two game-immanent reasons for this:

One, this really is part of Guns skill, and most examples of people breaking the rules is because they don't have the skill (default), they roll bad, or they have some relevant disadvantage.
Two, if there really were such a perk, then the majority of shooters, certainly those that people like to play as PCs (ie, good shooters with sound tactics etc), would be required to have this perk, which means they'd have one less point for other stuff, especially other perks that are actually useful.

Cheers

HANS

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

GURPS broadly assumes that any skill in which you have points was studied – at school, under a master, or at least from good books – rather than learned through trial and error. For instance, anbody with Chemistry has basic chemical safety, anybody with Driving has his license and passed the safety exam, and anybody with Guns has taken and passed a safety course. Nobody needs a perk except when he can do something that he knows better than to do without having to suffer the consequences of that action (e.g., Pants-Positive Safety).

Not knowing about basic safety for a skill is a quirk. I would say that the net effect of this quirk is that you roll at default for safety checks. Thus, a trial-and-error driver with such a quirk might have DX 12, IQ 10, and Driving-13, but roll at IQ-5 (5 or less!) if the GM wants to see whether he did something dumb, like leave his car stopped in neutral on a hill without the parking break on. Likewise, a trial-and-error shooter might have DX 12, IQ, 10, and Guns-13, but roll at IQ-4 (6 or less) to avoid idiocy like walking patrol with a round in the chamber, the hammer cocked, and a finger on the trigger.

When a science or a piece of technology is first developed, just about everybody might have this problem! I suspect that most pilots in the Wright era had it for Piloting, for instance.

And yeah, I consider it absolutely legit to let a character get Guns "for free" by taking Guns (E) DX [1] and "Guns accident waiting to happen" [-1]. He fires guns at DX in combat, but rolls DX-4 or IQ-4 most of the rest of the time to avoid shooting himself or his allies. Of course, the GM should only allow this if he plans to enforce the rules for safe firearms handling, and the GM is well within his rights to be aggressive about asking for safety checks from anybody who gets points for such a quirk.

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

Not sure that'd be enough to make it a desirable perk, perhaps add in, +1 Reaction from other shooters who appreciate your extra care and never being flagged by you.

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

Kromm (as always) makes a lot of sense.

I can't help but wonder, though... given two people who've never held a firearm before, if one of them has received the safety lecture and comprehends the Rules enough to make a valid attempt at being safe even if he can't necessarily recite them from memory doesn't he stand an improved chance of not shooting his own balls off versus the other guy?

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

Meh, it takes practice handling guns. "Don't shoot your balls off" is not really instructions most people need to be given, yet some people still manage to do it.

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

I was a vehicle commander on a ride along mission with some Army dudes (from a supposedly "elite" unit that I shall not name) that were the advanced party for the unit that was Relief-In-Place-ing us. When we returned to base, crossed the wire, and had to Unload/Show Clear, an Army Captain proceeded to clear his pistol by putting the barrel against his chest SAPI plate and racking the slide!

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

He what? I've never fired a gun in my life and I know better than that. Then again, there's overlap between gun safety rules and archery safety rules, and I've pretty much internalized the latter. I've also had a gun safety (well, hunting safety) course.

BTW, I am very glad that my local Wal-Mart no longer carries firearms. I'm convinced that the salescritter I dealt with did not merely lack the Guns skill, but had Incompetence: Guns. He kept waving the gun he was showing us around in a potentially hazardous manner even after we pointed out what he was doing wrong.

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

I met a lot of people in supposedly elite Army units that behaved in manners that blew my friggen' mind.

Sometimes I really do wonder whether Marines are the only people to be trained specifically to do what they're friggen' told instead of acting like Billy Bad***.

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

Yes, like holding your pistol sideways.

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

I've never seen anyone do something that stupid with a firearm. WOW

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

Oh, Hans knows about that stuff, too. He covers "gangsta shooting," and many other boneheaded blunders, in Tactical Shooting. Full game effects, too, so the GM knows just what sort of penalty to assign to someone who thinks it's "gangsta" to limp-wrist a semiautomatic.

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

Wow, that's also very stupid.

I've seen a grand total of one negligent discharge. The soldier in question had her finger too near the trigger while holding her weapon in the low ready. I was about to speak when she suddenly fired a round into the dirt.She looked surprised. Dear Lord, but the poor Iraqi prisoners who were being moved past her freaked out!

Of course, every once in a while some nimrod pops a round into the clearing barrel. This has never occured in my presence, though.

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

Hmmmmm....perhaps I must also buy this book. :)

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

This one often has more to do with the idiotic Army clearing instructions than anything else.
Seriously, telling people to rack, rack and then pull the trigger without at the very least telling them to eyeball the chamber, or wiggle their pinkies in it first, is just asking for trouble.

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

Hmmmm...Common Sense- wouldn't this advantage tend to eliminate a lot of unsafe/improper handling issues?
I mean, an adult from any culture in which guns are known and understood to be potentially deadly wepaons (most of the Earth, now) without any points in the Guns skill should already know that

• guns aren't toys
• don't point guns at people unless you mean to shoot them
• the round exists the muzzle
• etc

These points of basic safety are really common sense, not arcane rules. Yes, a lot of people are morons. Some morons are trainable, others are not.

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

I dunno which Army guys you were with, but if we'd cleared without eyeballing and fingering, we'd have been in deep doo doo. That was SOP in my unit.

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

They also are some degree of CoH. Much of the purpose of the rules is to make people pay attention to what they are doing with their gun above and beyond the basic benefits of the rules themselves.

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

A Father's Advice


If a sportsman true you'd be
Listen carefully to me. . .

Never, never let your gun
Pointed be at anyone.
That it may unloaded be
Matters not the least to me.

When a hedge or fence you cross
Though of time it cause a loss
From your gun the cartridge take
For the greater safety's sake.

If twixt you and neighbouring gun
Bird shall fly or beast may run
Let this maxim ere be thine
"Follow not across the line."

Stops and beaters oft unseen
Lurk behind some leafy screen.
Calm and steady always be
"Never shoot where you can't see."


You may kill or you may miss
But at all times think this:
"All the pheasants ever bred
Won't repay for one man dead."

Mark Beaufoy - 1902

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

Probably. I went shooting with a friend of mine who had never touched a gun before but his brother had once accidentally fired a shotgun through a wall at his house. He was VERY careful with the weapon, and still is every time I've gone out shooting with him.

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

Gun safety is as much about muscle memory as knowledge. You have to build the habit of handling weapons safely.

Some weapons are also easier to handle safely than others. People are a lot less likely to make a bad mistake with a long weapon than a handgun, for instance, because it's a lot easier to turn a handgun and point it in a bad direction. Although the only time my grandfather (a police officer and one of the best and safest shooters I have known) was shot was with his own .22 rifle while crossing a fence. The doctor was not sympathetic and used the cotton swab he cleaned the wound with much like a ram-rod.

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

The majority of people probably do use guns by default, but I dont see any reason they cant have at least some chance of not shooting themselves or doing other stupid things if theyve at least had some vague training

I mean, a few trips to the range and suffering through a hunters education course is not going to impart a point in guns, but should for someone who pays attention to such things avoid stupid mistakes

http://www.tpwd.state.tx.us/publicat...ter_education/

Shows hunting related accidents yearly before and after the law for mandatory education . . . . the education isnt enough to get gun skill, but apparently enough to reduce accidents

How should this be modeled?

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

Most people don't know these rules unless they're accustomed to handling guns. They may get the first point. They won't grasp the implications of the other points sufficiently to handle the weapon safely, other than to not handle it at all. As I've mentioned previously, safe handling requires building the habit as much as knowledge.

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

I'm pretty sure that most people know that the bullet exits the muzzle. That was number three on my list.

Knowing and doing aren't necessarilly the same thing, of course. Lots of people to know better.

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

Isn't Common Sense an explicitly Metagame advantage, though? It's supposed to prevent the player from having his character do something mind-bogglingly idiotic.

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

I'd say that a GM could certainly tell a player whose PC had the advantage that 'doing that with a firearm is something your PC knows that he ought not to do' if said PC was about to:

• pick up a dead/KOed bad guy's gun without even checking to see if it is loaded
  
• wave a loaded gun in somebody's face 'just to scare him'
  
• stick a gun in his waistband
  
• hold a gun sideways when shooting
  
• etc.

Mind you, I've not actually seen players have their PCs do these things, but I hear stories...

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

Does it need to be modelled? I'm serious.

I mean, do we have GURPS skills for looking both ways before your cross the street, cleaning your body in order to to stay healthy and smell nice, tying your shoes, or changing the batteries in your smoke alarm as needed?

Some things are simply common sense or common knowledge and are not complex, deep, or broad enough to be skills in game terms.

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

I've never touched a gun, except for toy guns or BB guns. Dad had a firearms license*. At a carnival where there was some shooting thing (shoot 5 shots at a paper target, get a cheap toy if you shoot well). I was 10-12 years old, and wanted to try, I was rather careless at where the barrel was pointing so I got a firearms safety lecture from dad.

What I know about guns is that when you pull the trigger magic happens and a bullet comes flying at speed from the end with a hole in it.

*It expired many many years ago and since he didn't have a firearm he didn't renew it.

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

Well, you see once upon a time there was a wizard in the magic land of Cathay. He made a magic powder to impress princes and knights. But an evil spy stole it, someone stole it from him ad infinitum. Until it came to the land of Albion where they sprinkled the magic powder on their ships and used them to conquer most of the world. Including large parts of Cathay.

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

See, everyone knows this. Very few people handle guns like they know it. It's better to handle guns like the magic death wands TV and action movies represent them as, yet STILL people with little experience handling firearms pay almost no attention to where precisely the end that the bullet comes out is pointing.

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

Don't get me started, but speaking of Army guys, didn't you just love having someone sit next to you, chest to chest, with their chest mount holstered pistol in condition 1?

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

TV and action movies also generally represent them as being highly resistant to accidental discharge while in hand. Think of how "anti Hollywood tradition" that accidental discharge in Pulp Fiction was.

People handling guns for the first time assume that pulling the trigger is likely to instakill someone, but they can carry it around with their finger parked in the guard without accidentally pulling the trigger.

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

Not to minimize the importance of gun safety, but please remember that almost no gun-safety-ignorant, gun-toting people accidentally shoot someone, even when drunk. Like car accidents (accidents, not crashes that occur because your character thought he could drive his semi down stairs on flat tires), gun accidents are so far down the probability curve that RPGs have to either massively inflate the danger, or approximate that they never occur at all.

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

I wouldn't say that, without looking at actual published numbers, I can say that anecdotally in handling insurance claims, that any given state is going to have at least handful of gun accidents every hunting season, most of them minor, like one claim I had of a guy using the stock of his rifle to clear brush while holding the barrel with his thumb over the muzzle, most minor incidents just go unreported.

Anecdotally I'll also say that most minor gun accidents in the military go unreported, the more egregious ones will result in article 15s and Captain's Masts, and the truly egregious ones result in court martials, but for the most part the vast majority of minor incidents are handled at the lowest level necessary to drive the point into the tool who jacked up.

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

We didn't do that. Not even necessary, with a double action autoloader.

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

Lots of people also lack Common Sense, or actually have mental disadvantages /low IQ in GURPS terms. Idiots abound.

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

I carried a carbine or rifle most of my time in , but when I did use a pistol, I always preferred a hip carry.

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

I haven't had that experience. On the contrary, most 'newbs' I've seen are quite careful in their handling. Of course, this may because they were around me, and I am big on safety.

I maintain that a GURPS character with the Common Sense advantage and of the appropriate TL would grok the basics of safe firearms handling even without proper training. Training would reinforce his natural common sense approach to safety, of course. Paying for Common Sense helps the PC avoid doing stupid things- like pointing a gun at your buddy, not checking to see if it's loaded, etc.

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

As I recall, adjusted for the number of people who own guns in America compared to cars, you're about 20 times more likely to die in a car accident driving to the range than by an accidental discharge of a firearm at the range. If you don't bump the rate up to account for the fact that not everyone owns a firearm, it's even rarer.

I wasn't able to find any statistics on what percentage of that involves someone under the influence of alcohol as the shooter, but I'm guessing it's a healthy chunk.

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

Sounds right, at any rate.

Somebody should tell the 'libyooorawls' to ban cars. They pollute our beautiful planet and kill more people than those nasty old guns.

:)

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

Cigarettes kill more Americans in a year than died in the entire Vietnam War.

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

Better ban those, too!

Oh, wait, they've taken us seriously, Crakkerjack. Good thing I don't smoke...

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

Now mind that I'm not against gun ownership, but that's not a meaningful comparison and I'd question how those numbers were calculated.
You'd need to compare actual rate of usage between the two, not overall numbers, and even then it's still quite a bit of apples and oranges.

After all, you don't have any accidents when you car is locked up in your garage, just like you don't have any accidents when your gun is locked up in its gun case.

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

They're taking us seriously? Best not to say anything about swimming pools or bathtubs, then... some things are worse than death.

We may die, but we'll die clean! XD

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

You'd be surprised...

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

Actually, organized crime is known to organize shooting lessons for its members.
According to the book Gomorra, the camorra (the mafia of Naples) even trained young boys to overcome fear and surprise caused by enemy fire... by having them wear bulletproof vests, and repeatedly shooting them with handguns.

So if it is true that a drug-dealer won't be a sharpshooter (a drug dealer outside of the U.S. isn't even likely to own a firearm), a dedicated thug working as "muscle" for a criminal investigation is likely to have received some sort of training.
He might very well be more used to actual gunfights than all those policemen who work mostly at their desk (and who arguably have only Guns (sport), not actual Guns skill).

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

I just took the yearly deaths for car accidents and compared them to yearly deaths for gun accidents in the US from the CDC or whatever. Then doubled (IIRC) the amount of firearms deaths based on the best statistics I could find indicating about half of households have one or more firearms in them, under the assumption that pretty much everyone has a car. As far as usage goes, I assumed that in general you had to actually be in the presence of a car or gun being handled in order to die from it.

Anywho, as you note it neglects all the people that don't die by guns because they're never around them, and neglects the fact that even gun owners use cars a lot more than they handle their guns. I did try to account for the first case, by tweaking gun deaths to represent ubiquitous ownership like we have for cars.

As for the second, I suppose it'd be more accurate to say that "if you own both a gun and a car, you are 20 times more likely to be accidentally killed by a car (not necessarily yours) than a gun (not necessarily yours)."

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

But car ownership isn't ubiquitous. Just comparing the number of cars to the number of people gets about 80% ownership but many households own multiple cars so we can bump that down a bit when making a comparison (as the 50% statistic is the number of households that have at least one gun).

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

Really? Only 80%? I just assumed that only 1% or something like that wouldn't own a car in the US and figured I could throw it out as negligible. Shows me what I get for assuming.

Re: Gun Safety Rules
 

There are a couple of metro areas (NYC and Chicago are the usual examples, maybe SF, definitely not LA, tho) where mass transit is ubiquitous enough that it's actually more practical to not incur the costs of owning a car.

In most of the country, yeah, having your own wheels is the way to go.