Accidental Gun Deaths Last Five Years of Record

I had to hunt a bit for this information, which I think many are interested in. The accidental firearm death rate is down 94% since 1905.

“How many times were guns fired to save a person's life?
How many times were guns used to successfully protect a person/ family from harm?”

These are very difficult figures to determine.

Most surveys find that firearms are used in defense or to stop a crime from 700,000 to 3 million times each year in the United States.

Most of the time, the gun does not have to be fired. They are fired in defense or to stop a crime about 5-10% of the time, but someone is actually hit only perhaps 1 percent of the time, and killed perhaps 1/10 of a percent of the time.

So, 1-3 million defensive or crime preventing uses of guns would translate to perhaps 700-3000 dead criminals a year.

That would seem plausible given that about 10,000 firearms homicides occur in the United States each year, and no particular statistics are tracked to keep good records that differentiate between self defense homicides and illegal homicides.

It is not uncommon for the coroner to write down that a death was from an accidental discharge rather than a suicide. This is done for two reasons, it helps the dead persons image and it keeps the phone from ringing so often.

So, if you want to kill yourself with a gun, do not put it in your mouth and just maybe the death certificate will show that you were a Klutz. Especially if there is firearm cleaning materials immediately handy to your location.

How many times were guns used to successfully protect a person/ family from harm?

That figure is essentially unquantifiable, since a firearm may in some cases protect a person/family from harm without the person/family being aware of it. Indeed, sometimes a non-existent firearm can provide such protection (e.g. if a crook decides against attacking someone someone he thinks is 'probably' armed). One might attempt to estimate how often such things occur by, e.g., interviewing former crooks who have gone straight, but I would not expect such estimates to be particularly accurate or meaningful.

One thing that a lot of anti-gun people don't seem to grasp, though, is that crooks aren't interested in getting into gunfights with people who would otherwise leave them alone (crooks do get into gunfights with other crooks, but that's an entirely different matter). A crook who gets the jump on someone carrying a concealed weapon might have a 90% chance of "winning" if he makes a surprise attack, but the 90% chance of surviving the encounter isn't nearly as good as the 100% chance of surviving an "encounter" where he doesn't attack at all.

You just don't hear about the number of accidental firearms deaths in the MSM anymore. The stopped reporting on it about 2000.

The MSM realize the gun issue didn't work for dems - so they dropped it.

Dems this year were talking about hunting. A few die hard liberals are clinging to this issue - but that's about it.

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