This is trolling, right? Please tell me you don't really believe that guns are only used in self-defense against criminals who also have guns. Hint: The number of gun crimes committed in the US is about 140,000 per year, the number of times people use guns for self-defense in the US is about 2 million per year.Originally Posted by Mr. E
I don't want to argue this point or anything, but can you tell me what source you're using for those figures? Just for future reference
Gladly. Actually, looking into it, my numbers may have been a bit off when it comes to the number of gun crimes per year. I gave the 140,000 figure based on the fact that the overall US violent crime rate is 1.4 million incidents per year (you should be able to find this figure pretty easily on any number of statistics-reporting websites, but here is where I got it from), while the US government estimates that approximately 10% of all violent crime involves a firearm of some kind (Dept. of Justice's figures here). However, you'll note that the same DOJ page says that firearms are involved in roughly 400,000--not 140,000--"incidents" per year. This is strange... using their own percentage, that would mean that there are over 4 million violent crimes per year in the US, which hasn't been the case in decades. Perhaps they are using the term "incidents" in a way that doesn't mean the same thing as "violent crimes". Well, either number works for our purposes, because either number is much lower than the number of defensive gun uses.
The figure on defensive gun uses per year comes from a study by Gary Kleck, a criminologist at FSU, whose work is generally regarded as being pretty authoritative in this field. It has been challenged numerous times by other academics who dispute his findings, but they've never been able to debunk them. If you want data to support a pro-gun-rights argument, Kleck is really a godsend--he's ideologically unimpeachable too (a liberal Democrat who thought his research would prove that guns did more harm than good, and was surprised by his own results), so the gun-control advocates can't really accuse him of being some shill for the NRA or whatever. I would definitely recommend reading up on his work if you want to debate people about this stuff. Incidentally, it's actually 2.5 million defensive gun uses per year, not 2 million--that was a typo in my previous post. There are also a bunch of other studies examining the number of defensive gun uses per year in the US, which got results ranging from 700,000 to above 3 million. Kleck's is generally regarded as the most accurate figure, though. Here is a table listing info on a bunch of other studies examining the same issue if you want to track them down too, though. Here is more info about Kleck if you want to follow up on some of that. Obviously it's not a good idea to try to use info from a website called "Guncite" in a gun control debate--the other side will just accuse you of using biased info from pro-gun groups--but these pages provide citations that you can use to find the same information in other sources that the opposition can't dismiss so easily.
Hah sorry man. I didn't mean to spoil it. I was afraid you were serious.Yes. I am impressed that no one is biting though. It takes the fun out of it
The data is collected by a variety of methods, depending on the study. Generally, the same way other statistical data is gathered from a population--by questioning/interviewing a randomly chosen sample of sufficiently large size. Sometimes it's done over the phone, sometimes in person, sometimes with written questionnaires.
As for ratio of justified defensive gun use to unjustified use, that's hard to estimate. If you mean the ratio of defensive gun uses to the number of people who are prosecuted for unlawful use of a gun in a self-defense situation, then it's very high (as I mentioned above, millions of defensive gun uses per year), but an argument could of course made that some number of people who unjustifiably defend themselves with a gun (for instance, in a situation when there isn't actually a clear threat to their lives) aren't prosecuted for it. However, it can definitely be said that the number of defensive gun uses is far, far greater than the number of people who unjustifiably kill someone in self-defense. Also, bear in mind that the vast majority of defensive gun uses don't involve any shots fired at all.
Last edited by Syme; 04-20-2009 at 04:12 PM.
That's a lot of stuff, thank you. And about the 'incidents' thing... it has been noted that in the UK gun incidents have gone up, but gun crime and homocides involving shootings have stayed the same. Generally this is put down to people literally shooting themselves in the foot... self-inflicted injuries and the like. Even things like criminal damage. So perhaps a similar idea could apply over there also.
I wouldn't be able to tell you *why* 'incidents' have risen, though. Increased paranoia and/or ignorance? No idea.
Good point. In addition to accidents, I suppose "firearms incidents" might include stuff like cases in which firearms are stolen during the course of a burglary--not a "violent crime" but it does technically involve a firearm.
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