[quote=CA renter]Yes, millions a year. No bullshit. Most incidents where guns are used in self-defense are never reported (I’m one of them). Even the most conservative estimates show tens or hundreds of thousands of crimes thwarted every year by guns. Something from dailykos/Mother Jones for you, lest anyone suggest we are “cherry picking” our sources:
MJ also points out how the gun lobby claims around 2.5 million instances of ‘defensive gun use’ or self-defense using a gun. The comparison to federal crime data from the Department of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Survey, in chart form, is downright ridiculous. The federal crime data from 2007-2011 tallies 338,700 uses of guns in self-defense, but if you believe the gun lobby, that number should be 12,500,000 — more than 36 times as many. Lies, damn lies and statistics, eh?
As a former victim of violent criminals, and also one who supports the Second Amendment because TYRANNY CAN HAPPEN HERE, I fully support the people’s right to own guns. That ownership should not be registered or tracked by the government in any way. Gun registration has NEVER prevented a single crime; the only reason for registration is to ensure the soldiers/police know where to go to confiscate weapons if a tyrant (or tyrants) ever comes into power and they want to prevent a revolution or stop a resistance effort.[/quote]
I think maybe that article you linked to doesn’t say what you think it says. Or at very least, it doesn’t support your “millions a year”. The part you bolded indicates, on average, over a 5 year period, it was fewer than 70,000 defensive gun uses per year.
And nowhere near 60% of the population owns guns. The percentage of homes with guns has very recently risen a little bit (with the very small increase possibly being statistically insignificant), after falling for the last 4 decades. Depending on which survey, it’s somewhere between 34 and 39% of households that have guns. Not individual ownership, but households with at least 1 gun. Note that the falling ownership rate correlates with the falling murder rate over that same time period. Fewer households with guns, fewer murders.
