"If you follow" is a tautological condition, you're close to saying "if you don't hurt yourself, your chances of hurting yourself is 0". (by the way, so proper firearm practices include "don't kill yourself if you're very depressed"?)
Yeah precisely. I am saying your chance of hurting yourself with a gun is zero if you just don't act like an idiot with a gun. the average statistics include massive numbers of idiots. I am not part of that population. Ergo, my risk is far different than theirs.
What im saying is that people have agency over their own behaviour. To throw out a blanket statistic and act like you have no control over where you land is insane.
Okay how about this :
Lets say over the next week, on average, 10% of the population will eat more calories than their maintenance requirements. Now for me, is my probability 10%? No, because I can actively decide which side of that I want to end up on. If I want to eat under maintenance, my chance is 0% if I want to overeat, my chance is 100% (provided adequate access to calories)
Is this making my point any more clear?
Im saying that if mitigation strategies exist for gun safety exist, then it makes no sense to say that 2 people with wildly different safety standards have the same probability of injurying themselves just because a particular average statistic has been studied and published at some point.
