your comment is evil, it prevents the good from living
your comment is irresponsible, it ignores facts
your comment is ignorant, it is your opinion devoid of facts
Research on guns as they are used in self-defense (defensive gun use). Includes information on how often they are used, victim injury rates for different defense tactics, as well as international crime data.
www.gunfacts.info
Myth: Private ownership of guns is not effective in preventing crime
Fact: “Victims who have and use guns have both lower losses and lesser injury rates from violent crime.”
1
Fact: Every year, people in the United States use guns to defend themselves against criminals an estimated 2,500,000 times – more than 6,500 people a day, or once every 13 seconds.
2 Of these instances, 15.7% of the people using firearms defensively stated that they “almost certainly” saved their lives by doing so.
Fact: Even the government’s estimate, which has a major methodology problem,
3 estimates people defend themselves 235,700 times each year with guns.
4
Fact: Victims with guns “would reduce … the criminals’ incentives to commit violent crimes and to be armed.”
5
Fact: The number of times per year an American uses a firearm to deter a home invasion alone is 498,000.
6
Fact: In 83.5% (2,087,500) of these successful gun defenses, the attacker either threatened or used force first, proving that guns are very well suited for self-defense.
7
Fact: There are approximately 182,000 defensive gun uses in public each year.
8
Fact: The rate of defensive gun use (DGU) is six times that of criminal gun use.
9
Fact: Of the 2,500,000 times citizens use guns to defend themselves, 92% merely brandish their gun or fire a warning shot to scare off their attackers.
10
Fact: In most of the remaining 8% of defensive gun uses, a citizen never wounds his or her attacker (they fire warning shots), and in less than one in a thousand instances is the attacker killed.
11
Fact: 41% of justifiable homicides using a gun were by private citizens, the others by law enforcement.
12
Fact: In one local review of firearm homicide, more than 12% were civilian legal defensive homicides.
13
Fact: For every accidental death (802), suicide (16,869) or homicide (11,348)
14 with a firearm (29,019), 13 lives (390,000)
15 are preserved through defensive use.
Fact: When using guns in self-defense, 91.1% of the time, not a single shot is fired.
16
Fact: After the implementation of Canada’s 1977 gun controls prohibiting handgun possession for protection, the “breaking and entering” crime rate rose 25%, surpassing the American rate.
17