Originally Posted by
PhaelixWW
The problem that you're having here, just like many others, is that you're attempting to reason by emotion, not logic.
Let's break down some numbers for you, okay? So per the most recent year of data, 195 kids under the age of 25 were killed by accidental discharge of a firearm. Per the most recent census data, there are about 105 million kids under the age of 25 in the country. That means that, all other factors aside, each kid has about a .0000446 (1 in 22435) chance of being victim of an accidental shooting death before they're 25 (195 per year x 24 years / 105 million). They have a much higher chance of being murdered as an adult than they do of being shot and killed as a youth (though both are small chances).
For comparison, a child is more likely to fall to their death, almost twice as likely to burn to death, more than six times as likely to accidentally drown, more than six times as likely to accidentally die by strangulation/suffocation, more than twenty-six times as likely to die from poisoning/overdosing, and more than forty-four times as likely to be killed in a car crash as they are to accidentally be shot and killed before the age of 25.
Let's focus on the gun owners now. During a typical gun owner's lifetime (60 years, 18 to the life expectancy of 78), around 30k people will be accidentally killed with a firearm. There are about 234m adults, and conservative gun ownership estimates are around 1/3 of adults, so about 78m people are gun owners. That means that only about 1 in 2600 gun owners will be involved in an accidental shooting death. That's not enough to paint all, or even most, gun owners as patently negligent or moronic.
Again, for comparison, there are about 20k homicides each year, which means (again, conservatively) 18k murderers, which is over 1m murderers over a typical adult lifetime. Which means that roughly 1 in 260 people will commit homicide.
But the real story is that crime numbers are 25-50% lower than what they were about 25 years ago. We just have an ever-pervasive news cycle and social media now to make sure you hear about all the nitty-gritty stuff that people rarely were faced with back then. You just have to learn to step back and place it all in perspective.
(N.B. - Also, if you're not in a gang, your risk of any kind of violent death goes down quite drastically.)