How, though, can you tell in how many of those cases, the person thought it wasn't loaded? That's one case where the cold chamber theory is fool's gold.
Further, I agree with you on a bunch of those... that the gun should be unloaded in the situation that are shown above- like climbing a tree, riding...
The key is safe gun handling. An appalling number of those examples are blatant cases of poor judgement or poor gun handling. As someone here likes to say, you can't legislate stoopid. You could tell everyone in Alabama that they had to hunt cold and I bet the total numbers would work out about the same.
The most dangerous thing any of us do anyway, to ourselves and those around us, is to drive a car. If you are driving to go hunting in a truck with mud tires on a rainy road ,or going 10 mph over the speed limit, or driving an old truck with a big steel bumper, you are risking those around you more than carrying hot or cold or whatever. I bet. So let's be realistic about the risk we are talking about here.
