I purposefully didn't put a "barf alert" because my purpose was discussion and digging out any genuine facts that might be hiding in here. A "barf alert" is (IMO) more of a signal to "pile on" than to discuss.
Personally, as someone interested in guns, I'm also highly interested in gun safety. Specifically: how can I make absolutely certain that having a gun(s) in my home will make for a MORE safe environment for my kids, rather than a LESS safe environment.
I suspect in the end that ALL statistics are of only limited value. Not ONE of us precisely matches the "AVERAGE PROFILE" of a group in a study. The REAL question is: given MY family and their personalities, MY situation, MY etc., etc., what is appropriate.
We have some friends with a teenage son who is just a hard-to-control lunatic, and has been that way since birth. NO WAY would I have a gun of any kind in that family UNLESS that particular son's access could be absolutely and permanently barred. If there's any way he could get ahold of the gun safe combination, forget it.
On the other hand, there are 8-year-olds who, given appropriate TRAINING, SUPERVISION, and PRACTICE, I wouldn't hesitate to trust with ready access to a fully loaded submachine gun...
You can't.
I'm not trying to be flippant, but you simply cannot
ever be absolutely certain about anything in the future.
You and your loved ones may never have need of a
firearm. Your house might be broken into tomorrow.
Your children could live a crime free life well into
their retirement years, or they could be attacked
before they get to an age where they start shaving.
Though you cannot be certain, you can play the odds.
Odds are that having a gun in your home that is
responsibly stored around well-parented children will
never cause unintended, unjustifiable harm to anyone.
Were this not true the U.S. population would be
millions of people short of where it stands now. There
are currently over 200 million privately owned firearms
(not just handguns, but all guns) in the U.S. today,
many of them decades old. If guns were inherently as
dangerous to have around as fear-mongers would have us
believe the herd would have been culled quite a bit by
now.
As mentioned by other posters on this thread, the
numbers you cite in the thread starting post have been
de-bunked for years. The information you posted is not
information to be discussed, it is disinformation fit
only to be dissected. The numbers you present are the
progeny of warped minds, non-causal links, outright
fraud, an abuse of the plain meaning of words in the
English language ("is"=is) and they represent little
more than another rehashing of tired propaganda.
I would gladly discuss the real numbers of
accidents/suicides/homicides/defensive-gun-uses if you
chose to post them, but you did not.
And before you place a research burden on me, remember;
I did not start this thread, you did.
I don't think you're either a moron or a troll.
And there are a lot of folks here who will discuss issues honestly and without namecalling.
However, you are bringing in links to sites which are decidedly anti-gunownership in their biases.
If you poke the hornets' nest, expect to see some flying insects.
John Lott, in addition to More Guns, Less Crime, has published papers on the effectiveness of self-storage laws, and I think I also saw one on suicides.
His stuff has been rigorously peer-reviewed multiple times, (despite all the vituperation that gets heaped on him).