Gun accidents happen to the kind of people who have accidents:
While gun accidents contribute only about 5% of the deaths linked with guns, they play an important rhetorical role in the gun control debate. They are used in attempts to persuade people that keeping guns in their homes for protection is foolish because the risks of a gun accident exceed any defensive benefits. Gun accidents play a different rhetorical role in the debate from homicides or suicides because most people can accurately tell themselves that there is no one in their household likely to assault another person or attempt suicide, but it is harder to confidently state that no one will be involved in an accident. Since anybody can have an accident, every household with a gun is at risk of suffering a gun accident.There are several problems with this argument. First, gun accidents are quite rare relative to the numbers of people exposed to them. The rate of accidental death per 100,000 guns or per 100,000 gun-owning households is less than 4–6% of the corresponding rates for automobiles, and has also been sharply declining for over 20 years, despite rapid increases in the size of the gun stock. Second, the risk of a gun accident is not randomly distributed across the gun-owning population and is not a significant risk for more than a small fraction of owners. Gun accidents are apparently largely confined to an unusually reckless subset of the population, with gun accidents disproportionately occurring to people with long records of motor vehicle accidents, traffic tickets, drunk driving arrests, and arrests for violent offenses. Accidents are most common among alcoholics and people with personality traits related to recklessness, impulsiveness, impatience, and emotional immaturity. The circumstances of gun accidents commonly involve acts of unusual recklessness, such as “playing” with loaded guns, pulling the trigger to see if a gun is loaded, and playing Russian roulette with a revolver. Gun accidents are largely confined to defensive gun owners — less than one sixth of accidental deaths are connected with hunting. Consequently, gun accidents are quite rare for ordinary gun owners, especially when compared with the frequency of defensive uses.
Contrary to impressions left by the news media, gun accidents rarely involve small children. There are probably fewer than 100 fatal handgun accidents involving preadolescent children in the entire nation each year. Instead, gun accidents are largely concentrated in the same age groups where assaultive violence is concentrated, among adolescent and young adult males.