can someone find flaw with the deduction that if you have a gun you are more likely to be shot by it than someone who doesnt have a gun?

Approximately 6,500 homicides were committed using handguns in 1999; since there were roughly 70 million handguns, the chance of any particular gun being used in a homicide is very low.[40]

When those statistics separate out victim vs criminal deaths, it will mean something; until then, it's absolutely useless. There is a world of difference between a young woman being shot while jogging and a young woman killing her would-be rapist.

I am glad I dont know you personally or Id feel compelled to shake you when you say things like this.

There is no guarantee your rapist wont just slit your throat. Stopping someone from attacking you is stopping them from the violent possibility of your death.

msharmony it sounds like you are very lucky women to be alive. It is also clear you are a fatalist.

such a discussion would be futile, because Im sure I can post information stating gun ownership correlates with HIGHER victimization,, and others could find things to post stating gun ownership correlates with lower victimization


one logical deduction, however, is that if you are possession of a gun, you are more likely to be shot by it than someone who doesnt have one,,,,

Sad . . . the statistics for accident discharge causing injury are miniscule. Its not even a number important in the death rate by firearm in the US.

This is an apples to oranges red herring having nothing to do with the discussion. We are talking about someone, not yourself, killing you with a firearm and your rebuttal is that if guns didn't exist people wouldn't have firearm accidents . . . . sigh.




msharmony your lack of knowledge on this topic is epic. Its clear you have spent very little time doing anything but reinforcing your own bias.

not at all ruth, I am just very persistent in my belief regarding the value of HUMAN LIFE

even a criminals life

I was assaulted and I MAY have been killed, but the assailant was obviously NOT interested in my death as I am still breathing

and so too should they be, because without some indication to me that someone intends to take my or my loved ones life, I could never live with taking theirs,,,,if thats fatalist,, so be it,,

Self-protection

Between 1987 and 1990, David McDowall found that guns were used in defense during a crime incident 64,615 times annually.[62] This equates to two times out of 1,000 incidents (0.2%) that occurred in this time frame.[62] For violent crimes (assault, robbery, and rape), guns were used 0.83% of the time in self-defense.[62] Of the times that guns were used in self-defense, 71% of the crimes were committed by strangers, with the rest of the incidents evenly divided between offenders that were acquaintances or persons well-known to the victim.[62] Of all incidents where a gun was used for self-defense, victims shot at the offender 28% of the time.[62] In 20% of the self-defense incidents, the guns were used by police officers.[62] During this same time period, 1987 and 1990, there were 46,319 gun homicides,[63] and the National Crime Victimization Survey estimates that 2,628,532 nonfatal crimes involving guns occurred.[62]

The findings of the McDowall's study for the American Journal of Public Health contrast with the findings of a 1993 study by Gary Kleck, who finds that as many as 2.45 million crimes are thwarted each year in the United States, and in most cases, the potential victim never fires a shot in these cases where firearms are used constructively for self-protection.[64] The results of the Kleck studies have been cited many times in scholarly and popular media.[65][66][67][68][69][70][71]

McDowall cites methodological issues with the Kleck studies, stating that Kleck used a very small sample size and did not confine self-defense to attempted victimizations where physical attacks had already commenced.[62] The former criticism, however, is inaccurate — Kleck's survey with Marc Gertz in fact used the largest sample size of any survey that ever asked respondents about defensive gun use — 4,977 cases, far more than is typical in national surveys.[72] A study of gun use in the 1990s, by David Hemenway at the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, found that criminal use of guns is far more common than self-defense use of guns.[73] By the Kleck study, however, most successful preventions of victimizations are accomplished without a shot being fired, which are not counted as a self-defense firearm usage by either the Hemenway or McDowall studies.[62][64][73] Hemenway, however, also argues that the Kleck figure is inconsistent with other known statistics for crime, citing that Kleck's figures apparently show that guns are many times more often used for self-defense in burglaries, than there are incidents of bulgaries of properties containing gun owners with awake occupants.[74] Hemenway concludes that under reasonable assumptions of random errors in sampling, because of the rarity of the event, the 2.5 million figure should be considered only as the top end of a 0-2.5 million confidence interval, suggesting a highly unreliable result that is likely a great overestimate, with the true figure at least 10 times less.

I think between these two studies you get a fairly unbiased idea of hand firearm defensive usage and the positive impact that usage has for the victims.

Now just imagine if the criminals were the only ones with guns.

on the one hand, it would be easier for the justice system to round them up because they would have no 'legal' justification for such a deadly weapon

This is not even an option in a free society with the constitutional protections of the 4th amendment so unless you favor completely removing any and all personal freedoms this shouldn't even be a consideration.

There are states in which stronger laws, similar to what you seem to suggesst, exist and the rate of violent crime has only increased.

Here is the reality.

If your business is crime you have an overwhelming incentive to own a firearm. If we could place a number to this level of need it would be orders of magnitude higher than a peaceful LAC who only desires to use a hand gun for recreation and personal defense.

What does this mean in practical terms. It means that any law that makes getting a firearm more difficult will exponentially effect the LAC's decision to purchase the firearm vs the criminal. At almost any cost the criminal will get a firearm. Usually by trading drugs or other hi value items often stolen in the pursuit of the crime in question. The street value of firearms is often 2-3 times that of the retail value and yet they still purchase them without hesitation.

Given the numbers of crimes that are thwarted with legal firearms any move to restrict legal access to firearms is a move that would harm far more than it could possibly help.

is also a huge assumption,, words like 'any, all', usually indicate a huge assumption being made,,,,

The bottom line is this. If you're depending on us, the police, to save your *** in any foreseeable situation, you're deluding yourself. You need to be able to protect and defend YOURSELF. Then, after you have taken care of business, you can call us to come clean up the mess. That way it'll be the person who attacked you who is bleeding in your driveway, instead of you.

Folks used to understand this, once upon a time. There has never been a time when the police would magically appear at the snap of your fingers. In fact, modern technology has made police response MUCH faster than it was at any time in the past. But people have somehow forgotten over the years that it is first YOUR responsibility to protect yourself. People have gotten soft, and come to the conclusion that any violence on their part is a bad thing. They don't want to be responsible for an injury to another person, no matter what that other person is doing unto them.

These shootings are so sad to hear about. I am glad we have very few here but we aren't allowed to carry guns so I suspect that curbs it somewhat.

These shootings are so sad to hear about. I am glad we have very few here but we aren't allowed to carry guns so I suspect that curbs it somewhat.

Must be nice. Here the Libtards wanna force their anti gun BS on everyone and it only take guns away from innocent people and puts them in the criminals hands.

Here, they make it difficult for anyone to get any kind of weapon. Our police have enough to deal with and don't need people going off half-cocked with weapons on them. We had some shootings with Asian gangs but even that has gone down and our general crime rate has gone down. It was put to a vote about people carrying concealed weapons but the majority of the popluation did not want it. Fact is though; criminals will always find a way to obtain guns whether our law is in place or not.

These shootings are so sad to hear about. I am glad we have very few here but we aren't allowed to carry guns so I suspect that curbs it somewhat.

Gottlieb cites an article by Canada's National Post columnist David Frum where he revealed that "Canada's overall crime rate is now 50 percent higher than the crime rate in the United States.” Moreover, "Since the early 1990s, crime rates have dropped in 48 of the 50 states and 80 percent of American cities. Over that same period, crime rates have risen in six of the 10 Canadian provinces and in seven of Canada’s 10 biggest cities.”

He also cites the most recent complete data available from both countries that shows that in 2003, the violent crime rate in the United States was 475 per 100,000 people; while up north, there were 963 violent crimes per 100,000 people. The figure for sexual assault in Canada per 100,000 people was more than double that of the United States: 74 as opposed to 32.1; and the assault rate in Canada was also more than twice that of the states: 746 to America's 295 for the people.

Moreover, he cites research that showed the figure for sexual assault in Canada per 100,000 people was more than double that of the United States: 74 as opposed to 32.1; and the assault rate in Canada was more than twice that of the United States: 746 to America’s 295. Also, in 2005, Toronto had 78 murders; that’s a 28 percent increase in homicides since 1995.

Unintended consequences.