This is true with respect to any individual gun owner, and I hope I consider it in my anti-gun posts. Even though guns increase risk for the average gun owner, if you could just look at people who have unusal emotional stability, who are unusally good shots, and are unusally good at securing their guns, their risk profile is different.
Also, many people have legitimate need to take on the risks of gun ownership, such as when required by their job, or if they need to hunt to feed their family.
On the other hand, it would be hard to be so self-aware that you know you are the exception to general trends. And the set of people who are actually self-aware and the set who is certain they are self-aware probably doesn’t much overlap. So I agree with pediatricians giving advice to parents based on public health statistics showing that gun risks outweigh benefits.
Also, if you sell your gun, or allow it to be inherited, the average risk profile reasonably applies.
This is why I think the federal government should mostly stick here to stuff having to do with manufacturing, which almost always involves interstate commerce. Smith & Wesson executives aren’t going to get into a shootout with police because they can no make a certain gun magazine.
One thing I’d like is for there to be rotating surgeon general type of warnings on guns, saying, for example:
“For every self-defense homicide involving a firearm kept in the home, there are 1.3 accidental deaths, 4.6 criminal homicides, and 37 firearm suicides.”
Above sentence is a slight rewording of a sentence on page 8 here:
http://www.iansa.org/system/files/Risks%20and%20Benefits%20of%20a%20Gun%20in%20the%20Home%202011.pdf
It wouldn’t be practical for manufacturers to have fifty different packagings, so this should be national. But if people in Wyoming want to preserve their sky high suicide rate by being awash in guns, well, I disagree with them, but I don’t want the federal government engaging in shootouts to force registration or confiscate existing guns.