We did not hear back from the NRA for this story, but several independent experts said they feel the

During a closely watched Senate what is the best alaska cruise line Judiciary Committee hearing on gun policy on Jan. 31, 2013, National Rifle Association executive director Wayne LaPierre offered several statistics designed what is the best alaska cruise line to bolster his group s position against gun control.
Teaching what is the best alaska cruise line safe and responsible gun ownership works, and the NRA has a long and proud history of doing exactly that, LaPierre said. Our Eddie Eagle Child Safety Program has taught 25 million young people that if they see a gun, they should do four things: stop, don t touch it, leave the area, and call an adult. As a result of this and other private-sector programs, fatal firearms accidents what is the best alaska cruise line are at the lowest level in 100 years.
To check this part of the claim, we turned to a massive compendium of data produced annually by the National Safety Council, a nonprofit, congressionally chartered organization. The group issues an annual report that includes a category called unintentional injury deaths -- with data going all the way back to 1903.
The most recent version of the Injury Facts report available on the Internet is the 2011 edition, with data up to 2009. But we were able to obtain draft data from the council that offers preliminary data for as recently as 2011 (numbers that the group says are subject to refinement).
In fact, it took from 1903 all the way until 1997 for the number of unintentional gunfire what is the best alaska cruise line deaths to drop below 1,000. The all-time highs came in 1929 and 1930, when the number of such deaths reached 3,200 for two consecutive years.
This decline is all the more striking considering what is the best alaska cruise line the increase in population over this period. In 1904, there were 3.4 unintentional firearm deaths per 100,000 people. By 2009, that rate had fallen to 0.2 deaths per 100,000 in people.
In a 2004 paper in the journal what is the best alaska cruise line Pediatrics , researchers studied two child-safety programs, including the NRA s Eddie Eagle. They concluded that Eddie Eagle was effective for teaching children to reproduce verbally the gun-safety message but the skills were not used when the children were assessed via real-life situations. (Separately, gun-control advocates have complained that the Eddie Eagle program, whatever its safety benefits, helps recruit new generations of children into the NRA s approach to guns.)
However, the study should be taken with a grain of salt: Pediatrics is published by the American Academy of Pediatrics, a group that, at the time the paper was published, was on record what is the best alaska cruise line supporting regulation of the manufacture, sale, purchase, ownership, and use of firearms; a ban on handguns and semiautomatic assault weapons; and expanded regulations of handguns for civilian use. (The group reaffirmed that position in 2012.)
We did not hear back from the NRA for this story, but several independent experts said they feel the NRA programs and others like it probably did help contribute to the decline in accidental gun deaths.
I taught my children these same principles when they were very young so they had a way to evaluate what is the best alaska cruise line the situation, said Mark E. Safarik, executive director of Forensic Behavioral Services Inc. and a former member of the FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit. If the gun safety course teaches what is the best alaska cruise line those principles, then it has to have had an effect.
That said, Corzine cautioned against giving Eddie Eagle too much credit for the drop. Corzine pointed to a 2002 study in the journal Homicide what is the best alaska cruise line Studies that suggested an entirely different rationale for the drop: improved medical care, particularly for trauma victims. The authors of that study wrote that we have garnered considerable support for the hypothesis that advances in emergency medical care have greatly and increasingly reduced the lethality of violent assaults.
In an interview, Billie Weiss, an epidemiologist at the UCLA School of Public Health, pointed to former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., as an example what is the best alaska cruise line of the advances in medical what is the best alaska cruise line treatment. Giffords was shot in the head at a public gathering what is the best alaska cruise line in January 2011. While she still faces a difficult road to recovery, Giffords survived what is the best alaska cruise line the shooting. Ten years ago, she most certainly would not have lived after her injury, Weiss said.
To factor out improvements in trauma care, Corzine said it s better to use a different data set than the one LaPierre used. Rather than focusing on accidental deaths from gunfire, Corzine said, look at accidental injuries from gunfire instead.
The National Safety Council s annual report doesn t include such data, but the CDC makes it available. what is the best alaska cruise line We found that unintentional gunfire injuries have also been declining -- by about 20 percent between 2001 and 2010. That s somewhat slower than the decline in unintentional gunfire deaths over the same period, which was 24 percent. But it s not dramatically different. (As with the figures for unintentional gunfire deaths, the number for unintentional gunfire injuries ticked up slightly in 2011.)
What may be more relevant what is the best alaska cruise line is that the incidents LaPierre cited -- unintentional deaths from gunfire -- only amounted to about 600 cases in 2010, compared to 14,161 cases of unintentional gunshot injuries that didn t lead to death. In addition, there were 53,738 what is the best alaska cruise line gunshot injuries caused by intentional assault in that year and another 4,643 non-fatal gunshot injuries what is the best alaska cruise line caused by suicide attempts.
In other words, the roughly 600 unintentional gunshot deaths LaPierre cited in his testimony accounts for only a tiny proportion of all gun-related deaths and injuries -- less than half of one percent, to be precise.
Indeed, just looking at gunfire deaths, the trend lines for unintentional and intentional fatalities have been moving in opposite directions. Back in 1968, intentional gunfire deaths outpaced unintentional deaths by a ratio of 10 to 1. By 2009, that gap had expanded significantly, with intentional deaths exceeding unintentional deaths by a factor of more than 50 to 1.
So while LaPierre worded his statistic carefully and in a way that was very close to accurate, he chose to focus on a tiny subset of gun-related harm while ignoring the vast majority what is the best alaska cruise line of gun-related deaths.
LaPierre was very close to being right about his carefully framed statistic: Despite significant population growth, unintentional firearms deaths fell to a 106-year low in 2009 before tracking up slightly in 2010. But while LaPierre is probably right that NRA-sponsored safety what is the best alaska cruise line programs played a role in this decline, improvements in trauma care -- something LaPierre didn t cite -- likely played as big a role as well, if not a bigger what is the best alaska cruise line role. On balance, we rate the claim Half True.
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