1. Most people don’t even understand how a gun mechanically functions. It lives in the realm of magic for most people, despite being mechanically very simple. This base ignorance of the function of a firearm is one of the biggest reasons why firearm-related accidents happen. You might not want a gun, and fine—that’s your stance—but you should know how it works and how to use it.
Unless you need to clean it and for that you can get help if you're ignorant, you don't need this detailed knowledge. You need to only know how to load and safety clear it, ideally know how to clear a jam, and that if you move any safeties to "Fire" it will fire if you pull the trigger.
As much as people like us are horrified by how little education so many people get about their guns, centuries of ergonomic improvements would seem to allow a tremendous number of them to use them safely and effectively in high stress self-defense situations.
> > Most people don’t even understand how a gun mechanically functions. It lives in the realm of magic for most people, despite being mechanically very simple. This base ignorance of the function of a firearm is one of the biggest reasons why firearm-related accidents happen. You might not want a gun, and fine—that’s your stance—but you should know how it works and how to use it.
> Unless you need to clean it and for that you can get help if you're ignorant, you don't need this detailed knowledge. You need to only know how to load and safety clear it, ideally know how to clear a jam, and that if you move any safeties to "Fire" it will fire if you pull the trigger.
That is FAR more information than most people have. Even the basic rules of gun safety - never point a gun at something you aren't willing to shoot, treat every firearm as if it's loaded, and keep your booger hook off the bang switch (and outside of the trigger guard entirely) until you're ready to fire - are more than most people know. "How to clear the gun or check the safety" might as well be rocket science.
I know a lot of people like to look down on their fellow Americans to the extent they even consider them to be so, but the hardest statistics we have on your concern is fatal gun accidents per year, and they've gone down from 800 to 500, actually 486 for 2019 from the CDC's most recent statistics, as the population has increased by 50%, the number of gun owners has massively increased and the number of guns owned by them has as much as doubled.
The "massive increase" is hard to get numbers for due to our culture war, but no one sane doubts it, and there's obvious reasons for it and the last fact which is on more solid ground, the nationwide sweep of "shall issue" or better concealed carry regimes and then add the "troubles" of the 21st Century starting with 9/11. And how many states went "Constitution Carry," we don't need no stinking licences this year? We're up to 21 total per Wikipedia.
Another question is how many fatal gun accidents were intentional suicides that the medical examiner, for whatever reason, didn't want to enter as such.
I know of one which was blatant second degree murder, but the perp was a "friend" visiting with a few others to the victim's home, all around 14 years old. Taking a gun on its way to the safe you found in a part of the house no one was supposed to be in, pointing it at your "friend's" head and pulling the trigger was ruled an unfortunate "accident."
See a bunch that just so happened to occur while the gun was "being cleaned," you can even begin that without emptying the chamber so you can work on the barrel.
Surprisingly, no. The number of misses at very close range in high-stress situations is very high. Hit rates for cops are in the 25% - 50% range, and that's with training.
It's easy enough to get a gun to fire. Hitting the right target requires practice.
I know NYPD had guns with really heavy triggers, far past anything reasonable. Lighter triggers (not really light, standard) and red dot optics would probably help a lot.
The vast majority of cops don't train very much, and requalification is often minimally difficult. Overall the civilian population is probably better trained.
This is also biased by big cities that have extinguished their gun culture, NYC in particular. That has grave consequences, shall I say.
I mean, an evergreen category of unintentional discharges is people pulling the magazine, and then accidentally firing the chambered round because they thought the gun was empty.
Notoriously, Glock pistols don't have a magazine disconnect, and their field strip procedure is to drop the magazine, rack the slide, pull the trigger, then pushing the slide lock to remove it. Skipping one of those steps has put a lot of holes in walls over the last few decades.
It's a gun. It's supposed to be dangerous! Owning a gun without knowing how it works is bad.
Unless you need to clean it and for that you can get help if you're ignorant, you don't need this detailed knowledge. You need to only know how to load and safety clear it, ideally know how to clear a jam, and that if you move any safeties to "Fire" it will fire if you pull the trigger.
As much as people like us are horrified by how little education so many people get about their guns, centuries of ergonomic improvements would seem to allow a tremendous number of them to use them safely and effectively in high stress self-defense situations.