In addition, if I'm never exposed to a gun or a pool, then my risk of dying by either is zero. That doesn't mean those things have no risk. It means that my personal risk of dying from those things is zero and I shouldn't be included in any calculation that measures the risk of owning those things.

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.

We may be talking about that, and that would be the figure to find, but that's not the figure the Freakonomics article used. That's the point.

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.