William M. Briggs, Statistician

Another one of those “studies” showing that guns might be unsafe (who knew?) has come out. Here’s a quote: “Over 70 percent of families surveyed reported not storing their firearms safely in their residence,” said Robert DuRant of the Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center. “This concerns us a great deal because having guns in the home increases the likelihood that they will be used in a suicide or unintentional injury.”

The good doctor would have also wanted to point out, I am sure, that, if a family didn’t have a gun in the house, then of course that missing gun would not be very dangerous. Indeed, one of the “study’s” most prescient conclusions was that the “safest practice would be to remove guns from the house.”

These guys, these “researchers”, never seem to remember that Mark Twain was ahead of all of them, warning people way back in 1882 about the inherent dangerousness of guns in the house:

Don’t meddle with old unloaded firearms. They are the most deadly and unerring things that have ever been created by man. You don’t have to take any pains at all with them; you don’t have to have a rest, you don’t have to have any sights on the gun, you don’t have to take aim, even. No, you just pick out a relative and bang away, and you are sure to get him. A youth who can’t hit a cathedral at thirty yards with a Gatling gun in three-quarters of an hour, can take up an old empty musket and bag his mother every time at a hundred. Think what Waterloo would have been if one of the armies had been boys armed with old rusty muskets supposed not to be loaded, and the other army had been composed of their female relations. The very thought of it makes me shudder.

Anyway, this particular “study” estimates some 200 million guns are owned and, necessarily, stored by us. Just imagine the potential slaughter that awaits! Always remember: guns might be unsafe. Which is why you hear so many stories like this, again from Twain:

Never handle firearms carelessly. The sorrow and suffering that have been caused through the innocent but heedless handling of firearms by the young! Only four days ago, right in the next farmhouse to the one where I am spending the summer, a grandmother, old and gray and sweet, one of the loveliest spirits in the land, was sitting at her work, when her young grandson crept in and got down an old, battered, rusty gun which had not been touched for many years and was supposed not to be loaded, and pointed it at her, laughing and threatening to shoot. In her fright she ran screaming and pleading toward the door on the other side of the room; but as she passed him he placed the gun almost against her very breast and pulled the trigger! He had supposed it was not loaded. And he was right—it wasn’t. So there wasn’t any harm done. It is the only case of that kind I ever heard of.

Lest you think this new “study” didn’t find anything useful to say, we have this: “Our research shows that unsafe gun storage is associated with families who were raised with guns in the home,” DuRant said. “They tend to be more comfortable with guns…” I never would have guessed this, so it’s a good thing that this “study” was conducted.

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