For instance, if in 2008 376 children died by gun at home and as much as 376000 families had a gun at home, then the risk would be 0.1%. But if the number of families with a gun at home were 752, then this would mean a risk of 50%!
It makes complete sense. We take number of children (i.e. population) and we take the number of times something bad occurs to that population, and that gives us our level of risk per each individual (e.g. 1 in 100,000 or similar).
If we follow the logic of your argument then we start getting into stupid territory very quickly indeed. For example, how many bees are there in the US? And how many people die of bee stings? Well given the number of bees Vs. bee sting deaths we can calculate that you have more chance of winning the lottery two times than dying of a bee string, right? ... Well no, that makes no sense at all.
Basically gun advocates are abusing statistics. They're arguing that keeping two guns in your gun safe instead of one makes guns twice as safe! And four guns is twice as safe again! So as they increase guns the guns get safer and safer, isn't that wonderful...
Zero people in my town were attacked by lions last year, but I'm sure a few were attacked by dogs. Cool! Lions are way safer than dogs!
UnoriginalGuy, I'd suggest taking a step back from your argument for a minute. Every single response here has explained the flaw in your original claim. It might be worth taking a minute to understand where you could have gone wrong in your reasoning.
Here's the quote from Freakonomics:
"In a given year, there is one drowning of a child for every 11,000 residential pools in the United States. Meanwhile, there is 1 child killed by a gun for every 1 million-plus guns"
And then the author draws conclusions based on that. It says nothing about "drowning in a pool" - only drowning. It says nothing about death by a gun at the gun owner's house. It says nothing about households with multiple guns (nor households with multiple pools, I guess).
The point UnoriginalGuy was trying to make is that this is absolutely shoddy statistics at work. Now his statistics may be equally as shoddy, but he's not selling books about this stuff.
So what you're saying is [deaths of children by gun]/[number of children]. That's not an absolute number, 1 in 100000 is just a percentage disguised (0.01%).
My only remark on your comment is that only children living in houses that have a gun should be taken into account when calculating the risk of "having your child killed by a gun that you keep in your house".
I don't understand. This seems sensible to me. Why wouldn't we include this figure to calculate risk? Isn't risk a matter of incidences/exposures?