Gun Safety Rules

[Crakkerjakk]

Originally Posted by Ze'Manel Cunha

It looks like it's about 1.2 vehicles per 1 driver in the the US:
http://picasaweb.google.com/PeakVT/P...06316294467282

Sure, by defining "driver" as someone with a license. I'm not sure if that's a useful metric.

Originally Posted by Ze'Manel Cunha

Keep in mind though, that unlike unregistered cars which can't be taken out on the roads, unregistered guns work fine despite not being registered.

Lots of guns don't need to registered, they're too old, blackpowder, antiques, or they have questionable provenance, like all the old skorpions showing up these days coming back from Afghanistan.

That's a fair point. But positing that there's some number of households with unregistered guns that don't show up in the statistics just means the ratio is even lower than 1 to 20. In 2006, there were 642 accidental gun deaths. In the same year, 42,708 traffic fatalities, with about 5,000 of those pedestrians.

Oh hey! In 2006 there were around 17 accidental deaths per 100,000 registered vehicles. Since we know there are roughly the same numbers of registered firearms, that gives you roughly 0.26 accidental deaths per 100,000 registered firearms in the same year.

As you note, this doesn't account for differences in usage. We're not Yemen with everyone and their mother wandering around with AKs. But having a gun in the house doesn't appreciably increase your likelihood of accidental death.