I still go back to that if there were 2x more house fire deaths this year than last year, I wouldnt change my smoke detector set up.
There is a fundamental point in this that I've tried to make over and over again and I'm not sure if it's just really unpopular with this audience here at THR, or if I'm not saying it well.
There are a lot of things that could kill us. The National Institute of Health list them and produces sets of statistics regularly which explain which ones have killed the most of us. And if you look through those lengthy reports, you'll see all sorts of diseases, injuries, accidents, phenomena, critters, bugs, chemicals, events, and so forth which are to blame for deaths of a certain number of Americans every year. We can get pretty clear ideas of which ones are most likely to hurt us by looking at the rates per hundred thousand of our population.
We could, if we really really cared about saving our own lives, take very careful stock of ourselves in light of every one of those threats. We could decide just how much weight that threat is likely to represent to us based on our heredity and habits, and in most of those cases we could do something to reduce the chances of that particular thing killing us.
A lot of those things would require time spent, and a lot of them would require some money expended. None of us has unlimited time or money. But we're talking about trying to save our lives here. I'm sure we would all do everything we could to reduce the risks of those great and dangerous killers.
It is pretty unlikely, if we were really logical about this effort, that guns would show up anywhere near the upper end in our list of most important life-saving strategies. Violence of any sort is not one of the top 10 killers of Americans. (Unless you count suicide which is always very problematic to discuss here among so many Libertarians who really don't cotton very much to the idea that someone's going to take away their guns so that they can't end their own lives if they so choose.)
When we do finally get to violence as a cause of death, it is only rational to grasp what kinds of violence are common. The most common kinds of violence in the US don't particularly need a gun response from most of us reading here, because our primary strategy is completely avoiding those sorts of people doing those sorts of things in those sorts of places. However we all know that that's no cure all and some violence will still befall those of us who are wise about our associates and our activities. Those instances of violence are still far, far, far and away represented by common street crime, hold-ups, robberies, home invasions, Etc. So in those instances where we do need a gun it's going to be a personally carried sidearm, or it's going to be our home defense weapon.
Once we've dealt with that, there would come an enormous pile of lethal factors which range from not very likely, to very very unlikely, and on to "wow, that's really unlikely." Most of these things we are never even going to think about, and certainly will never never lift a finger to protect ourselves from.
And way out at the tail end of that list you find things like being killed by the pet dog, being killed by the swing set in your backyard, death at the hands of a mass murderer, and then slightly less commonly, being killed by a balloon as I mentioned, or dying in a plane crash as member Nuclear has suggested.
What I find really kind of frustrating and not very self-aware of us, is that this is a gun forum and so we get pretty worked up about how much we probably ought to go put a rifle in our car trunk. We do guns, we like guns, guns are the answer. If guns aren't the answer then you're not giving the problem enough thought.
And we like to talk about how illogical and unscientific all of the gun opponents, soccer moms, and "sheeple" are who aren't smart enough to arm up to defend themselves. What fools! They'll be sorry! Meanwhile we are blissfully ignoring probably thousands of other risks that are somewhere between quite a bit more likely, and a whole lot more likely to actually kill us.
I am not arguing that we really should go out in the backyard and cut down the swing set because, hey, we need to be consistent. I'm arguing that it is good and proper we don't pay attention to that risk, generally. Swing sets are neat, life isn't without risk, go have a good time. But the unpopular position that I'm taking here is, don't let our love for our rifles, and our enthusiasm for keeping them handy, lead us to irrational conclusions and statements about real levels of risk, or to make impractical responses to it.