painfully obvious: how to keep children from shooting themselves and others

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Lemon Drop wrote:

There are more instances when display or production of a gun stops a crime from being committed, than gun being shot.

anybody have credible evidence that this is true? There are some good studies that say it's not. This is a difficult thing to prove because it can only be learned through surveys and polls.

If you want statistics all you need is ask.....

Researcher John Lott argues in both More Guns, Less Crime and The Bias Against Guns that media coverage of defensive gun use is rare, noting that in general, only shootings ending in fatalities are discussed in news stories. In More Guns, Less Crime, Lott writes that "since in many defensive cases a handgun is simply brandished, and no one is harmed, many defensive uses are never even reported to the police".

Attempting to quantify this phenomenon, in the first edition of the book, published in May 1998, Lott wrote that "national surveys" suggested that "98 percent of the time that people use guns defensively, they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack." The higher the rate of defensive gun uses that do not end in the attacker being killed or wounded, the easier it is to explain why defensive gun uses are not covered by the media without reference to media bias....
In 2002, he repeated the survey, and reported that brandishing a weapon was sufficient to stop an attack 95% of the time. Other researchers criticized his methodology, saying that his sample size of 1,015 respondents was too small for the study to be accurate and that the majority of similar studies suggest a value between 70 and 80 percent brandishment-only. Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz's 1994 estimate rises to 92 percent when brandishing and warning shots are added together.

Notice that the extent of the peer controversy are the percentages, 98% vs 70%, not the fact that more guns are being displayed than used, yet still doing their job.....

BTW besides using a gun several times in self defense, back in my New York days, I claim no expertise in this field....