Yes, but I note this in that NRA rebuttal site:

In reply to:


Nationwide, 58% of firearm-related deaths are suicides,(7) - a problem which is not solved by gun laws aimed at denying firearms to criminals. "Gun control" advocates would have the public believe that armed citizens often accidentally kill family members, mistaking them for criminals. But such incidents constitute less than 2% of fatal firearms accidents.



So, I do not think my original comments are invalidated by NRA's rebuttal Fable#1.

I never said X times more likely to be killed or injured by owning a gun ( I did say many times more)

In relation to the point at hand (that having a gun in the home leads to more people being killed or injured than would otherwise be the case) - I think the above statistic shows this up. Especially for suicides.

Yes there may be a link between mental instability and suicides- Tthe fact still remains that if you add a gun in the home to that mix (for any member of the familiy in that home), then the (succesful) suicide rate will increase.

I wonder what the "accidental injury rate" is, given the "accidental death rate" is stated as 2%, more than that I would expect.
As don't forget to add to the sucessful suicide rate, the unsucessful cases, where the person did not kill themselves outright and the accidental "injury rate" from a gun in the house will surely exceed the NRA quoted "2%" figure.

I would expect that most gun related injuries are not directly due to people mistaking family members for criminals (or though that happens - even the NRA admits that), more likely you will be injured due to ricochets or splinters/bullet fragments or flying pieces of the building (e.g. masonry) or glass from windows, or even just the noise, from discharging a firearm inside a enclosed space.

A house is not a shooting range, nor is it the same as the outdoors - a house has lots of rooms "linked" to each other with common walls (or neighbours within a few feet of the home - either laterally or vertically - so while a bullet may miss the "target" and hit a wall or window, its what it hits on the other side of the wall or window that can cause injury as well.


I have some grave doubts about many of the statistics presented on the website you linked to.

The NRA seems to take a position that enforcement (or lack of it) is the underlying problem, yet in many case, it refuses to accept that enforcement of these rules is acceptable or valid.

For instance I note this statement is one of many I find troubling:

In reply to:


Mandatory (gun) storage laws also would be virtually impossible to enforce without violating the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches. ...

... Most states provide penalties for reckless endangerment, under which an adult found grossly negligent in the storage of a firearm can be prosecuted for a criminal offense.



How will the adults who do not store their firearms safely ever be caught, if the 4th Ammendment protects them from being subject to such checks as they could be deemed "unreasonable searches"?

I also note that the text says "Most states" - not all states, so in some states do not have such rules, so one presumably can be as careless as you like with Firearms and not be subject to any penalties in those states.

I wonder if these states the rates of injury and death in the home are different from the states which do have and enforce proper gun storage and negligence laws?

There is also this comment:
In reply to:


British gun owners failed to resist the passage of "reasonable" gun laws and have seen their rights almost completely disappear in the space of a few decades.
England changed from a nation with almost no restrictions on gun ownership and no crime, to a nation where all but certain rifles and shotguns are banned and crime is rising.



I'd like to know in which year (in the last few hundred or [thousand] years) was the year in which England had a population > 1 and no crime.

I also think that any link between rising crime levels and gun control laws is very dubious.

Crime rates worldwide are rising, even in those countries and states that have not changed their gun control laws.

To state as above that "crime is rising because gun control was bought in" is very misleading.

A large part of any rise in crime is generally due to increased reporting, not necessarily an increased incidence of crime or criminal activity.

Insurance companies in the UK and elsewhere (e.g. Australia and New Zealand and probably Canada too), will not allow claims for property lost due to crime/criminal activity without a copy of an offical police report.

This means that in countries like the above the "reported crime" rates for "low-level" offences like burglary is much higher than in many other places (the US included), since you have to report the crime to make an insurance claim.

Also, do not forget that world wide the population is rising, if only a small (and steady) percentage of individuals commit crimes, then of course the incidence will increase - in line with the general population growth.

Any crime statistics that do not compare "per capita" (per head of population) statistics and instead quote absolute "crime" numbers or take into account differing categorisation across jurisdictions are meaningless for comparison.

I found a lot of this sort of mis-use of statistics on the NRAILA website.