First, the American Academy of Pediatrics is not politically neutral in the gun debate. The AAP supports standard Left positions, including “federal firearms legislation that bans assault weapon sales and the sales of high capacity magazines” and “the strongest possible regulations of handguns for civilian use.” The AAP also recommends that parents “NEVER have a gun in the home” (“NEVER” capitalized in their statement). Their website also cites the now-discredited 1986 claim that, “A gun kept in the home is 43 times more likely to kill someone known to the family than to kill someone in self-defense.”
However, numerous scholars have noted that most of those unfortunate deaths were suicides that would have likely still occurred even if no gun had been available. David Kopel of the Independence Institute observed that after excluding such suicides, the ratio was closer to 2-to-1. Furthermore, comparing numbers of accidental or unlawful deaths to justified deaths of criminals is misleading, because it fails to include many nonlethal self-defense uses of firearms. Depending on the source, there are 800,000 to 2.5 million defensive gun uses each year where law-abiding gun owners deter criminals without firing a shot (let alone killing the bad guy).
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