Here is some good information you might not be aware of concerning gun violence and self protection. Worth checking out. I've talked to the editor when he was writing about a incident that I had personal information on. He is a super good guy.
http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/20...ive-gun-uses-than-taken-in-criminal-gun-uses/
Here’s a fact you’ll never see in mainstream media accounts of “gun violence” in America: defensive
gun uses save more than twice as many lives than the number lost in criminal gun uses. Here are the numbers:
According to
the Kleck-Gertz study from the mid 1990s, there are between 2.1 and 2.5 million defensive
gun uses (DGU’s) annually.
Now there are a lot of people out there who deride this number as ludicrous. But they’re unable or (more likely) unwilling to accept that Dr. Kleck is not a shill for the Gun Lobby™. This, despite the good doctor
disclosing in his 1997 book Targeting Guns that . . .
The author is a member of the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International USA, Independent Action, Democrats 2000, and Common Cause, among other politically liberal organizations He is a lifelong registered Democrat, as well as a contributor to liberal Democratic candidates.
He is not now, nor has he ever been, a member of, or contributor to, the National
Rifle Association,
HandgunControl, Inc. nor any other advocacy organization, nor has he received funding for research from any such organization.
But skeptics gotta skeptic. Antis prefer their own “reality.” So let’s go ahead and throw the K-G number out in favor of something more conservative.
Let’s use the numbers from the study commissioned by the Clinton DoJ shortly after the K-G study was published.
That study was conducted by Drs. Philip Cook and Jens Ludwig, longtime proponents of strict
gun control. It concluded that there were 1.46 million DGUs per year.
Some reject even this lower number. Instead, they put their faith in the
National Crime Victimization Surveys‘ estimate that there are between 50k and 100k DGUs per year. (A number that’s still higher than the number of annual firearms-related homicides.)
The NCVS
seriously undercounts the number of DGUs. I’ll let Dr. Tom Smith, Senior Fellow and Director of the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago explain:
. . . the estimates of the NCVSs are too low. There are two chief reasons for this. First, only DGUs that are reported as part of a victim’s response to a specified crime are potentially covered.
While most major felonies are covered by the NCVSs, a number of crimes such as trespassing, vandalism, and malicious mischief are not. DGUs in response to these and other events beyond the
scope of the NCVSs are missed.
Second, the NCVSs do not directly inquire about DGUs. After a covered crime has been reported, the imvictim is asked if he or she “did or tried to do [anything] about the incident while it was going on.”
Indirect questions that rely on a respondent volunteering a specific element as part of a broad and unfocused inquiry uniformly lead to undercounts of the particular of interest.
There’s another problem with the failure to directly inquire about DGUs: the DGU question is only triggered by someone saying they were the victim of a crime. If someone came towards me with a knife saying “Gimme your wallet” and I put my hand on my weapon and replied “I don’t think so, Skippy,” causing the assailant to retreat, was I the victim of a crime?
