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 he gun-control advocates can't really accuse him of being some shill for the NRA. 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.
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