Does Owning a Gun Make You Safer?

Let's legislate based on the measured outcomes

My objection is the argument that only "irresponsible" people cause accidental gun deaths so it's not worth changing the laws for everyone else. This presumes that we need guns in the hands of responsible people and the deaths of kids due to irresponsible people is just an unfortunate, but necessary, cost of keeping gun ownership legal.

The statistical facts are that guns in a home increase the chance that someone in that home will be killed by that gun due to a homicide, suicide or accident at a level well above the chance that the gun will be used for self-defense. Here is the list of stats and their sources on one website:
http://www.ichv.org/Statistics.htm
I tend to believe the CDC and New England Journal of Medicine, though I'm sure the NRA's researchers will claim they have some anti-gun agenda funded by their insatiable desire to obtain more tax dollars or perhaps those pediatricians' blood thirsty quest to keep their patients alive so they can keep billing them for office visits...

I'm not sure what alliance a concealed carry permit holder is making with the police. Are you going to be drawing your weapon and shooting at any criminal you see? I haven't seen any police chief or FBI director endorse that kind of help. I don't doubt that most gun owners are law abiding. The problem is that several thousand each year are not. And when they want to break the law, they have an almost unlimited access to incredibly powerful weapons. We would all be far safer if those people were presented with the choice of using a knife or their fists versus having to try to break into a military base to obtain a weapon more powerful and dangerous than a hunting rifle. Several hundred more gun owners make the mistake each year of leaving their weapons where a child can get access to them and then shoot themselves or someone else.

Your point that large scale public shootings happen BECAUSE of "no gun zones" - is one of the more incendiary arguments I've heard in awhile. The point of not allowing guns in there is to prevent the kind of crime that happened. If those people had to go through a rigorous licensing process, have to pay a hefty fee to own even one rifle and in general not have the option of buying up several hand guns, semi automatic assault rifles and armor piercing bullets with a valid drivers license and a fairly clean criminal background, they wouldn't have the ability to kill at the scale and efficiency they've been able to achieve. The thought that the best defense against those kind of people is to arm everyone who wants to carry a gun around town is a leap of faith most people are not willing to make. We'd rather have everyone but the police disarmed and make it much more difficult for mentally disturbed/violent/criminal/irresponsible people to obtain weapons. And the incidents are not "rare". Killing ten or more people intentionally in the span of 30 minutes is "rare" when it happens once a year. Having a student come into school and shoot classmates and teachers is "rare" when it happens once every five years. When it happens 5-10 times per year, it's "frequent".

And as a final note - the rate of deaths due to lots of other causes far exceeds handguns. Heart disease, lung cancer, traffic fatalities, pedestrian deaths etc. The difference is that these are all by products of either diseases or useful tools where most people agree their benefits outweigh the costs. Most people don't agree that the benefit of gun ownership outweighs the cost to society. But because most people don't care enough to lobby and vote based on this issue as much as the NRA lobbies and funds campaigns against congressmen that vote against them, legislators don't take their side.