The debate about guns and gun control has heated up recently due to a previously unimaginable series of terrible and tragic shootings. Regardless of what side of the debate they're on, there's always someone out there with a pocket full of statistics ready to be tossed out during an argument. If you have a bunch of numbers that say people are less safe living in an area with a lot of guns, someone else will have a completely contradictory set of numbers that say all those same guns in that same area have prevented no less than five alien invasions, and shut up because you can't prove that didn't happen.

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Through the messy cluster of all the cold, soulless numbers that represent lives forever altered by a gun, there's one startling and important statistic that's always left out of every gun control debate: Almost every year, one person is shot by a dog. That's one too many, mostly because of the part about how it's a dog doing the shooting. That should happen roughly zero times, forever. And yet, it happens a lot.