"You certainly have the constitutional right to protect yourself and your family; however, I always add as a caveat that more people are injured and/or killed by accident with their own handguns. " Nonsense. Unfortunately, Officer Michelle, nonsense like this ...in a sort of "throw-away" line..... blemishes your otherwise excellent article. Professor Gary Kleck has shown that the the total number of defensive gun uses in the US is on the order of 1 million...that's 1,000,000 ....each year, and may be as high as 2.5 million. (Gary Kleck, Point Blank, Aldine de Gruyter Press, 1991) Other sources report lower numbers. The National Crime Victimization Survey, run by the DoJ, will typically estimate about 100,000 DGU's per year. (see Gun Control in the United States, A Reference Handbook, pg 19.) No one doubts that the majority of DGUs are with handguns. As Kleck points out, apparently nearly all guns people keep loaded in their homes are handguns. And of course, all of us who have CCWs carry handguns. And what is the total number of accidental gun injuries in the US each year? Well, we can go to the Centers for Disease Control website and use the WISQARS search tool. In 2006 - the last year for which i can find complete data - there were 642 accidental gun deaths and 14,678 nonfatal accidental firearms injuries. (see http://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars). That's a total of about 15,000 firearms injuries per year, of which about 2% are fatal. (I can't find a breakdown on handguns versus long guns here, so I'll keep doing some research.) Realizing we are working with statistics, we see that there are probably anywhere from 6 to 160 times as many defensive gun uses as accidnetal gun injuries. So, no, you are not more likely to hurt yourself accidnetally with a gun than you are to be able to use a gun in self-defense. Yours, Andrew Frechtling