RavennofTitan wrote:
Reality though is that the person that you will most likely have to defend your self from is already next to you and is just one bad day away from being a threat to your life.
At the risk of repeating myself, this is just plain not true. It's "true" only if you limit your statistics to situations where the gun was actually fired. But the overwhelming majority of defensive uses of a firearm do not involve the firearm being fired.
Just one of
many such sources. Check out the "Crime and Self Defense" section:
Quote:
Roughly 16,272 murders were committed in the United States during 2008. Of these, about 10,886 or 67% were committed with firearms.[11]
* A 1993 nationwide survey of 4,977 households found that over the previous five years, at least 0.5% of households had members who had used a gun for defense during a situation in which they thought someone "almost certainly would have been killed" if they "had not used a gun for protection." Applied to the U.S. population, this amounts to 162,000 such incidents per year. This figure excludes all "military service, police work, or work as a security guard."[12]
* Based on survey data from the U.S. Department of Justice, roughly 5,340,000 violent crimes were committed in the United States during 2008. These include simple/aggravated assaults, robberies, sexual assaults, rapes, and murders.[13] [14] [15] Of these, about 436,000 or 8% were committed by offenders visibly armed with a gun.[16]
* Based on survey data from a 2000 study published in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology,[17] U.S. civilians use guns to defend themselves and others from crime at least 989,883 times per year.[18]
* A 1993 nationwide survey of 4,977 households found that over the previous five years, at least 3.5% of households had members who had used a gun "for self-protection or for the protection of property at home, work, or elsewhere." Applied to the U.S. population, this amounts to 1,029,615 such incidents per year. This figure excludes all "military service, police work, or work as a security guard."[19]
* A 1994 survey conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that Americans use guns to frighten away intruders who are breaking into their homes about 498,000 times per year.[20]
* A 1982 survey of male felons in 11 state prisons dispersed across the U.S. found:[21]
• 34% had been "scared off, shot at, wounded, or captured by an armed victim"
• 40% had decided not to commit a crime because they "knew or believed that the victim was carrying a gun"
• 69% personally knew other criminals who had been "scared off, shot at, wounded, or captured by an armed victim"[22]
Point is that uses of firearms for self defense fall pretty consistently at about 1 million per year. The total number of homicides by firearm is tiny in comparison. Even when we look at all crimes committed with a firearm, it's somewhere around half the number of times firearms are used to defend against a crime. Let me also point out that this particular source is relying on the lowball numbers from government statistics. There are a number of sites that will refute those numbers and argue that uses of firearms for self defense is much much higher.
But even using the lowest numbers we can possibly find, we're still left with guns being used to defend against a criminal act twice as often as they're being used to commit a crime, and used to defend against a situation where the victim was sure they or someone they were protecting would be killed 15 times more often than they're used to actually kill anyone. While people love to parrot the idea that guns are most likely to hurt their owners, the actual stats show otherwise.
Edited, Mar 25th 2014 2:57pm by gbaji 
