Oh if only responsible gun owners looked after their guns...
'A crime of opportunity': More guns than ever were stolen from vehicles in Nashville in 2021
More “responsible” gun owners behaving irresponsibly; and that’s only in one city. We could do a "Lott" or a "Kleck" and extrapolate these numbers across the USA which would give us between 402,880 and 24,544,205 guns stolen from responsible gun owners vehicles in the US in 2021. Wow, so many irresponsible “responsible” gun owners! Of course, we also would need to look at thefts from homes and gun stores…
And the other side....lives saved...because Americans can defend themselves....
600 million guns in private hands......over 21.25 million Americans can carry guns legally in public for self defense.........
American use those legal guns 1.1 million times a year to stop rapes, stabbings, beatings, robberies, and murders, as well as also stopping mass public shootings when they are allowed to have their legal guns with them...
Gun deaths...the truth....
2019...
Gun murder...10,235
Gun accidents...486
Of the gun murder deaths....over 70-80% of the victims are not regular Americans....they are criminals...murdered by other criminals in primarily democrat party controlled cities....where the democrat party judges, prosecutors and politicians have released them over and over again no matter how many times they are arrested for felony, illegal gun possession and violent crimes with guns...that's on you and your political party...not normal gun owners.
Gun suicides... 23,491...
Americans use their legal guns 1.1 million times a year to stop brutal rapes, robberies, beatings, knifings, murders......according to the Centers for Disease Control, and 1.5 million times according to the Department of Justice.
Lives saved....based on research? By law abiding gun owners using guns to stop criminals?
Case Closed: Kleck Is Still Correct
that makes for at least 176,000 lives saved—
Money saved from people not being beaten, raped, murdered, robbed?.......
So figuring that the average DGU saves one half of a person’s life—as “gun violence” predominantly affects younger demographics—that gives us $3.465 million per half life.
Putting this all together, we find that the monetary benefit of guns (by way of DGUs) is roughly $1.02 trillion per year. That’s trillion. With a ‘T’.
I was going to go on and calculate the costs of incarceration ($50K/year) saved by people killing 1527 criminals annually, and then look at the lifetime cost to society of an average criminal (something in excess of $1 million). But all of that would be a drop in the bucket compared to the $1,000,000,000,000 ($1T) annual benefit of gun ownership.
When compared to the (inflation adjusted from 2002) $127.5 billion ‘cost’ of gun violence calculated by by our Ludwig-Cook buddies, guns save a little more than eight times what they “cost.”
Which, I might add, is completely irrelevant since “the freedom to own and carry the weapon of your choice is a natural, fundamental, and inalienable human, individual, civil, and Constitutional right — subject neither to the democratic process nor to arguments grounded in social utility.”
So even taking Motherboard’s own total and multiplying it by 100, the benefits to society of civilian gun ownership dwarf the associated costs.
Annual Defensive Gun Use Savings Dwarf Study's "Gun Violence" Costs - The Truth About Guns