Examining the fatal accident table below, one sees that fatal gun accidents among children are rare. Gun control groups and pro-control medical researchers often include "children" up to the age of nineteen and in some cases twenty-four, to inflate the number of "child" gun accidents. (This is the only way it can be claimed a child is killed everyday in a gun accident. Compare fatal gun accidents to the number of kids killed while crossing the street.) The solutions one may propose to prevent child accidents should differ from those of young adults. For example pressure sensitive pistol grips won't help much when older "kids" are playing Russian Roulette, especially in places where it's legal for eighteen or twenty-one year-olds to own firearms.
As rare as fatal gun accidents are among young children, their actual frequency is probably overstated. Florida State University criminologist Dr. Gary Kleck suggests that some fatal gun accidents may actually be the culmination of a history of child abuse, in other words intentional homicides. Dr. Kleck cites a national survey conducted in 1976 (Strauss, M., et. al., Behind Closed Doors: Violence in the American Family, Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1981), which found "3% of children had, in the previous year, had guns or knives (the two are combined in the source) actually used on them by their parents, according to the parents' own admissions. Since this translates into about 46,000 such incidents per year, it would not be surprising if a few dozen resulted in a gun death falsely reported as accidental."(Gary Kleck, Targeting Guns: Firearms and Their Control, p 209. Walter de Gruyter, Inc., New York, 1997.)
Dr. Kleck further mentions, "The risk of being a victim of a fatal gun accident can be better appreciated if it is compared to a more familiar risk...Each year about five hundred children under the age of five accidentally drown in residential swimming pools, compared to about forty killed in gun accidents, despite the fact that there are only about five million households with swimming pools, compared to at least 43 million with guns. Thus, based on owning households, the risk of a fatal accident among small children is over one hundred times higher for swimming pools than for guns." (p 296)
In Targeting Guns, Dr. Kleck concludes in part, "Most gun accidents occur in the home, many (perhaps most) of them involving guns kept for defense. However, very few accidents occur in connection with actual defensive uses of guns. Gun accidents are generally committed by unusually reckless people with records of heavy drinking, repeated involvement in automobile crashes, many traffic citations, and prior arrests for assault. Gun accidents, then, involve a rare and atypical subset of the population, as both shooters and victims. They rarely involve children, and most commonly involve adolescents and young adults."
"The risk of a gun accident is extremely low, even among defensive gun owners, except among a very small, identifiably high-risk subset of the population. Consequently, it is doubtful whether, for the average gun owner, the risk of a gun accident could counterbalance the benefits of keeping a gun in the home for protection: the risk of an accident is quite low overall, and is virtually nonexistent for most gun owners." (p 321)