Despite Increases In Gun Ownership, Accidents Decrease

One of the few areas anti-gunners get worked up and don’t completely make me blow a gasket is when they talk about accidents with firearms. Accidents do happen, but so long as even one person gets hurt in a gun-related accident, the rate is way too high. When the term “gun safety” comes up in this context, I’m onboard. After all, they generally aren’t really accidents, but negligence.

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It’s all the stupid responses to these accidents that anti-gunners come up with that make me both furious and roll my eyes.

However, over at America’s First Freedom, Julie Golob has some interesting information on firearm-related accidents.

Gun ownership has risen to an all-time high. Accidental shooting deaths have fallen 48% since 1999

Baffled. That’s the best way to describe the reaction by the liberal media outlets when they discover that statistics for accidental gun deaths are down, even as the number of Americans owning guns is at an all-time high. But somehow these media outlets, and their compatriots in groups like Michael Bloomberg’s so-called Everytown for Gun Safety, always have the answer: Despite the fact that many attempts by anti-gun politicians to enact more restrictions on Second Amendment-protected rights have failed, according to them, we can ultimately thank gun control for the decrease in accidents.

When you dig into the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) statistics, the number of accidental shooting deaths since 1999 hasn’t merely declined—it has dropped off significantly. Taking into account population growth, the number of deaths is down by a whopping 48 percent! It certainly is a statistic to celebrate, and one would imagine we’d know exactly how and why this plummet has occurred.

According to Los Angeles Times contact reporter Kurtis Lee, “Experts attribute the decline to a mix of gun-safety education programs, state laws regulating gun storage in homes and a drop in the number of households that have guns.”

Who are those “experts”? Everytown for Gun Safety is of course at the top of Lee’s list. We know it as the organization that makes a mockery of real gun safety. Responsible gun owners know that safely storing firearms when they are not in use is key in preventing unauthorized access and accidental deaths. We know this because of true firearm safety education programs, not laws in some anti-gun states that take firearm storage mandates to the extreme.

What about the population of responsible gun owners in America? These “experts” also cite victory in the reduction in the number of households with guns. Yet fbi statistics from the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (nics) indicate otherwise. When looking at the same period, 1999-2015, the number of background checks more than doubled, from 9,138,123 checks in 1999 to 23,141,970 in 2015. The numbers for 2016 and 2017 are also up from 2015, with nics stats reporting more than 25 million checks for each year.

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In other words, gun safety is increasing despite an increasing number of firearms in circulation. This is a good thing.

Of course, as Golob notes, the leftist media attributes part of that to laws regarding storage, but I’m going to call BS on that one. You see, while there are laws in some places regarding how you store a weapon, they’re not universal.

According to Giffords, just 11 states have some kind of gun storage law. While that does include a couple fairly populated states, it’s still only 11 states out of 50. If gun storage laws are having any appreciable impact, it would have to be because people in those 11 states were complete and total morons prior to the passage of the law.

That’s something I don’t buy.

No, the credit for the drop has to go to programs put out by pro-gun organizations that don’t treat firearms like something forged from the fires of Mt. Doom, but instead as a tool that can be dangerous if misused. You know, the kind put out by the NRA, an organization currently being called a terrorist organization by some lawmakers.

For terrorists, the NRA sure does a lot to prevent people getting killed, you know?

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