redbloodedamerica:

The Good Guy with a Gun: A Total Myth (I Swear!)

“Guns: never used for self-defense.  Did you know guns killed 30,000 people last year?  That’s 30,000 victims of gun violence in a single 12-month period!” 

Well, not exactly.  The phrase “gun violence” implies that there were 30,000 homicides, but if you remove accidental deaths and suicide you find that number shrinks to 11,000.  But even if you want to go with the inflated 30,000 statistic, that doesn’t change the fact that guns are used to save lives way way more often than they’re used to take them. 

“No way!  The ‘good guy with a gun’ is a myth.  There are roughly 300,000 gun crimes committed per year.  When our guns ever used defensively?” 

Likely over two million times per year. 

“What?  That’s absolute NRA nonsense!  Don’t you know that flimsy stat comes from that old Kleck & Gertz study that only sampled Florida.  Weirdos live in Florida.  They probably just called Tom Woods house a thousand times.  It was a bad study!” 

Yeah, that’s what I thought too.  But it turns out the figure suggesting guns of use defensively over two million times per year were actually validated by a CDC study done shortly after the Kleck & Gertz study.  Yet oddly enough, these figures were basically left unreported.  

“What?  Well, still those figures are old.  They’re from the 90s.  Can you even name a single good thing that came out of the 90s?” 

Well, if that’s too out-of-date for you, what about this 2013 study ordered by the CDC and conducted by the National Academies Institute of Medicine and National Research Council, which found: “Defensive use of guns by crime victims as a common occurrence,” stating, “Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million, in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008.”  

So, just to recap… 

“No cut it out!  You’re hijacking my PSA!”  

Annually firearms are the weapon of choice at 11,000 homicides and 300,000 miscellaneous crimes, but they’re much more often used as instruments of defense protecting between 500,000 and 3 million people from violent crimes each year.  Are you against the right of these people to safety?