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> Don't think I'm attacking you, Eric, because I have no intentions of doing that, but I have a question. Why do people have guns in their houses? I don't get it. If the gun is loaded, that's just an accident waiting to happen.

So?

Lots of things could be labeled "accidents waiting to happen." Walking down a flight of stairs. Driving down the street to Walmart. Climbing a ladder. Playing a contact sport. Heck, going to the hospital is an accident waiting to happen. (120,000 accidental hospital deaths in 1999, 1,500 accidental gun deaths.)

"In Targeting Guns, Dr. Kleck concludes in part, 'Most gun accidents occur in the home, many (perhaps most) of them involving guns kept for defense. However, very few accidents occur in connection with actual defensive uses of guns. Gun accidents are generally committed by unusually reckless people with records of heavy drinking, repeated involvement in automobile crashes, many traffic citations, and prior arrests for assault. Gun accidents, then, involve a rare and atypical subset of the population, as both shooters and victims. They rarely involve children, and most commonly involve adolescents and young adults.'"

The whole "accident waiting to happen" thing is massively overblown. There are far more riskier things we do every day than keeping a loaded gun on the very top of the wardrobe.

The Other Matthew