I looked into the trope that "you're more likely to accidentally kill or be killed by your own gun than to use it to protect yourself" a while ago, and found it was wrong.
I think maybe the creator of that trope was including suicides, which is misleading and I'd argue just plain wrong. According to [0], there are about 50,000 self-defense uses of a firearm per year. [1] suggests there are about 4-500 accidental firearms deaths per year in the U.S. (and I'd bet many of those are "accidental" in that the decedant's family wanted it classified as an accident for insurance and / or religious reasons).
Any way you slice it, the rate of actual accidental deaths is really, really low. Not something to worry about at all if you're okay with things like...driving to work (about 30x riskier in aggregate per year assuming half of U.S. households have a gun [edit: and assuming everyone has the same risk of death by car accident, of course]).
Oh, and when you're thinking about "gun injuries" it's important to keep in mind that the vast majority are things like small burns, injuries to the web between the thumb and pointer finger caused by exposed hammers, things like that. Some places have enacted laws with harsh penalties for doctors saying that any injury resulting from using a gun must be reported as a firearm-related injury or some such, which of course artificially inflates the numbers and makes it difficult to differentiate between "someone was accidentally shot and survived" and "little Timmy burned his hand on Grandpa's .22".
I think maybe the creator of that trope was including suicides, which is misleading and I'd argue just plain wrong. According to [0], there are about 50,000 self-defense uses of a firearm per year. [1] suggests there are about 4-500 accidental firearms deaths per year in the U.S. (and I'd bet many of those are "accidental" in that the decedant's family wanted it classified as an accident for insurance and / or religious reasons).
Any way you slice it, the rate of actual accidental deaths is really, really low. Not something to worry about at all if you're okay with things like...driving to work (about 30x riskier in aggregate per year assuming half of U.S. households have a gun [edit: and assuming everyone has the same risk of death by car accident, of course]).
Oh, and when you're thinking about "gun injuries" it's important to keep in mind that the vast majority are things like small burns, injuries to the web between the thumb and pointer finger caused by exposed hammers, things like that. Some places have enacted laws with harsh penalties for doctors saying that any injury resulting from using a gun must be reported as a firearm-related injury or some such, which of course artificially inflates the numbers and makes it difficult to differentiate between "someone was accidentally shot and survived" and "little Timmy burned his hand on Grandpa's .22".
0: https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/fv9311.pdf 1: https://injepijournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40...