The NRA and the gun lovers try to convince people that some people's champion is going to roar up the the scene Spiderman style and resolve any crime situation with a few shots from the magic criminal buster.
The trouble is little tale is just plain false.


http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2015/06/18/3671392/study-people-use-guns-self-defense/
But a timely study from the Violence Policy Center (VPC) concluded that guns are rarely used for defensive purposes. According to the most recent data that’s available, there were 8,342 criminal firearm homicides by private citizens (non-law enforcement members) in 2012 — as opposed to 259 justifiable homicides. In other words, there were 32 criminal homicides for every killing of a felon who was in the process of committing a crime. And 13 states reported zero justifiable homicides that year.


As noted by VPC, the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) observed a similar trend in previous years. Between 2007 and 2011, 29,618,300 people experienced a violent crime, but only 235,700 — 0.8 percent — of victims used or threatened to use a gun in self-defense. Findings from both the VPC and NCVS supplement studies verifying that more guns lead to more crimes.
Still, gun advocates keep arguing that guns are great for self-defense.
“The reality of self-defense gun use bears no resemblance to the exaggerated claims of the gun lobby and gun industry. The number of justifiable homicides that occur in our nation each year pale in comparison to criminal homicides, let alone gun suicides and fatal unintentional shootings,” the study reads. “The idea that firearms are frequently used in self-defense is the primary argument that the gun lobby and firearms industry use to expand the carrying of firearms into an ever-increasing number of public spaces and even to prevent the regulation of military-style semiautomatic assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines.”

This paper is a synopsis of exhaustive DGU (Defensive Gun Use) research. I have posted the conclusion only, the meat of this preceeds it. It is a long read, but it definitively debunks the propaganda you get from leftist websites and radical hate groups like the VPC and SPLC.

I have also included the extensive list of sources for this paper. Something you never see included with leftist propaganda and screeds against gun ownership.

As Jeff Cooper has said, "It is better to have a gun and not need it than to not have one if you ever do."

V. CONCLUSION

If one were committed to rejecting the seemingly overwhelming survey evidence on the frequency of DGU, one could speculate, albeit without any empirical foundation whatsoever, that nearly all of the people reporting such experiences are simply making them up. We feel this is implausible. An R who had actually experienced a DGU would have no difficulty responding with a "no" answer to our DGU question because a "no" response was not followed up by further questioning. On the other hand, lying with a false "yes" answer required a good deal more imagination and energy. Since we asked as many as nineteen questions on the topic, this would entail spontaneously inventing as many as nineteen plausible and internally consistent bits of false information and doing so in a way that gave no hint to experienced interviewers that they were being deceived.

Suppose someone persisted in believing in the anomalous NCVS estimates of DGU frequency and wanted to use a "dishonest respondent" hypothesis to account for estimates from the present survey that are as much as thirty times higher. In order to do this, one would have to suppose that twenty-nine out of every thirty people reporting a DGU in the present survey were lying. There is no precedent in criminological survey research for such an enormous level of intentional and sustained falsification.

The banal and undramatic nature of the reported incidents also undercuts the dishonest respondent speculation. While all the incidents involved a crime, and usually a fairly serious one, only 8% of the alleged gun defenders claimed to have shot their adversaries, and only 24% claim to have fired their gun. If large numbers of Rs were inventing their accounts, one would think they would have created more exciting scenarios.

By this time there seems little legitimate scholarly reason to doubt that defensive gun use is very common in the U.S., and that it probably is substantially more common than criminal gun use. This should not come as a surprise, given that there are far more gun-owning crime victims than there are gun-owning criminals and that victimization is spread out over many different victims, while offending is more concentrated among a relatively small number of offenders.

There is little legitimate reason to continue accepting the NCVS estimates of DGU frequency as even approximately valid. The gross inconsistencies between the NCVS and all other sources of information make it reasonable to suppose that all but a handful of NCVS victims who had used a gun for protection in the reported incidents refrained from mentioning this gun use. In light of evidence on the injury-preventing effectiveness of victim gun use, in some cases where the absence of victim injury is credited to either nonresistance or some unarmed form of resistance, the absence of injury may have actually been due to resistance with a gun, which the victim failed to mention to the interviewer.

The policy implications of these results are straightforward. These findings do not imply anything about whether moderate regulatory measures such as background checks or purchase permits would be desirable. Regulatory measures which do not disarm large shares of the general population would not significantly reduce beneficial defensive uses of firearms by noncriminals. On the other hand, prohibitionist measures, whether aimed at all guns or just at handguns, are aimed at disarming criminals and noncriminals alike. They would therefore discourage and presumably decrease the frequency of DGU among noncriminal crime victims because even minimally effective gun bans would disarm at least some noncriminals. The same would be true of laws which ban gun carrying. In sum, measures that effectively reduce gun availability among the noncriminal majority also would reduce DGUs that otherwise would have saved lives, prevented injuries, thwarted rape attempts, driven off burglars, and helped victims retain their property.

Since as many as 400,000 people a year use guns in situations where the defenders claim that they "almost certainly" saved a life by doing so, this result cannot be dismissed as trivial. If even one-tenth of these people are accurate in their stated perceptions, the number of lives saved by victim use of guns would still exceed the total number of lives taken with guns. It is not possible to know how many lives are actually saved this way, for the simple reason that no one can be certain how crime incidents would have turned out had the participants acted differently than they actually did. But surely this is too serious a matter to simply assume that practically everyone who says he believes he saved a life by using a gun was wrong.

This is also too serious a matter to base conclusions on silly statistics comparing the number of lives taken with guns with the number of criminals killed by victims.[100] Killing a criminal is not a benefit to the victim, but rather a nightmare to be suffered for years afterward. Saving a life through DGU would be a benefit, but this almost never involves killing the criminal; probably fewer than 3,000 criminals are lawfully killed by gun-wielding victims each year,[101] representing only about 1/1000 of the number of DGUs, and less than 1% of the number of purportedly life-saving DGUs. Therefore, the number of justifiable homicides cannot serve as even a rough index of life-saving gun uses. Since this comparison does not involve any measured benefit, it can shed no light on the benefits and costs of keeping guns in the home for protection.[102]

(*) The authors wish to thank David Bordua, Gary Mauser, Seymour Sudman, and James Wright for their help in designing the survey instrument. The authors also wish to thank the highly skilled staff responsible for the interviewing: Michael Trapp (Supervisor), David Antonacci, James Belcher, Robert Bunting, Melissa Cross, Sandy Hawker, Dana R. Jones, Harvey Langford, Jr., Susannah R. Maher, Nia Mastin-Walker, Brian Murray, Miranda Ross, Dale Sellers, Esty

[1] Marvin E. Wolfgang, Patterns in Criminal Homicide 245 (1958).
[2] Richard A. Berk et al., Mutual Combat and Other Family Violence Myths, in The Dark Side of Families 197 (David Finkelhor et al. eds., 1983).
[3] See generally Michael J. Hindelang, Criminal Victimization in Eight American Cities (1976); Gary Kleck, Crime Control Through the Private Use of Armed Force, 35 Soc. Probs. 1 (1988); Gary Kleck & Miriam & DeLone, Victim Resistance and Offender Weapon Effects in Robbery, 9 J. Quantitive Criminology 55 (1993); Eduard A. Ziegenhagen & Dolores Brosnan, Victim Responses to Robbery and Crime Control Polity, 23 Criminology 675 (1985).
[4] See generally Philip J. Cook, The Technology of personal Violence, 14 Crime & Just: Ann. Rev. Res. 1, 57 (1991).
[5] Ziegenhagen & Brosnan, supra note 3; Kleck supra note 3; Kleck & Delone, supra note 3.
[6] Kleck, supra note 3.
[7) Cook, supra note 4, at 58.
[8] Kleck & Delone, supra note 3, at 75.
[9] Joan M. Mcdermott, Rape Victimization in 26 American Cities (1979).
[10] Quinsey & Upfold, Rape Completion and Victim Injury as a Function of Female Resistance Strategy, 17 Can. J. Behav. Sci. 40 (1985).
[11] Alan J. Lizotte, Determinants of Completing Rape and Assault, 2 J. Quantitative Criminology 203 (1986).
[12] Gary Kleck & Susan Sayles, Rape and Resistance, 37 Soc. Probs. 149 (1990).
[13] Quinsey & Upfold, supra note 10, at 46-47. See generally Sarah E. Ullman & Raymond A. Knight, Fighting Back: Women's Resistance to Rape, 7 J. Interpersonal Violence 31 (1992).
[14] See Kleck, supra note 3, at 9.
[15] Cook, supra note 4; David McDowall & Brian Wiersema, The Incidence of defensive Firearm Use by U.S. Crime Victims, 1987 Through 1990, 84 Am. J. Pub. Health 1982 (1994); Understanding and Preventing Violence 265 (Albert J. Reiss & Jeffrey A. Roth eds., 1993).
[16] Kleck, supra note 3, at 8.
[17] Cook, supra note 4, at 56; Michael R. Rand, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Guns and Crime (Crime Data Brief) (1994).
[18] See Kleck, supra note 3, at 3; Gary Kleck, Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America 146 (1991).
[19] Gary A. Mauser, Firearms and Self-defense: The Canadian Case, Presented at the Annual Meetings of the American Society of Criminology (Oct. 28, 1993).
[20] Rand, supra note 17.
[21] Cook, supra note 4, at 56; McDowall & Wiersema, supra note 15.
[22] Understanding and Preventing Violence, supra note 15, at 265-66.
[23] Id. at 265.
[24] Cook, supra note 4, at 54.
[25] U.S. Bureau of the Census, National Crime Survey: Interviewer's Manual, NCS-550, Part D -- How to Enumerate NCS (1986).
[26] U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, Criminal Victimization in the United States 1992, at 128 (1994).
[27] Colin Loftin & Ellen J. MacKenzie, Building National Estimates of Violent Victimization 21-23 (April 1-4, 1990) (unpublished background paper prepared for the Symposium on the Understanding and Control of Violent Behavior, sponsored by the National Research Council).
[28] Patrick Blackman, Carrying Handguns for Personal Protection 31 (1985) (unpublished paper presented at the annual meetings of the American Society of Criminology) (Nov. 13-16, 1985); Kleck, supra note 18, at 412.
[29] Kent M. Ronhovde & Gloria P. Sugars, Survey of Select State Firearm Control Laws, in Federal Regulation of Firearms 204-05 (H. Hogan ed., 1982) (report prepared for the U.S. Senate judiciary Committee by the Congressional Research Service).
[30] U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, supra note 26, at 75.
[31] Id. at 124, 128.
[32] See Table 1, row labelled "Time Span of Use."
[33] Id. at row labelled "Excluded military, police uses."
[34] Id. at row labelled "Defensive question refers to."
[35] U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, supra note 26, at 144.
[36] Cambridge Reports, Inc., an Analysis of Public Attitudes Towards Handgun Control (1978); The Ohio Statistical Analysis Center, Ohio Citizen Attitudes Concerning Crime and Criminal Justice (1982); H. Quinley, Memorandum reporting results from Time/CNN Poll of Gun Owners, dated Feb. 6, 1990 (1990).
[37] Kleck, Supra note 18, at 106-07.
[38] Understanding and Preventing Violence, supra note 15, at 266.
[39] Gary Kleck, Guns and Self-Defense (1994) (unpublished manuscript on file with the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL).
[40] Seymour Sudman & Norman M. Bradbum, Effects of Time and Memory Factors on Response in Surveys, 68 J. Am. Stat. Ass'n 808 (1973).
[41] Kleck, supra note 39.
[42] Completed interviews, n=4,977.
[43] See, eg., David J. Bordua et al., Illinios Law Enforcement Commission Patterns of Firearms Ownership, Regulation and Use in Illinios (1979); Seymore Sudman & Norman Bradburn, Response Effects in Surveys (1974); James Wright & Peter Rossi, Armed and Considered Dangerous (1986); Alan J. Lizotte & David J. Bordua, Firearms Ownership for Sport and Protection, 46 Am. Soc. and American Attitudes Towards Firearm, 32 CAN. J. Criminology 573 (1990); Gary Mauser, "Sorry, Wrong Number. Why Media Polls on Gun Control Are Often Unreliable, 9 Pol. Comm. 69 (1992); Mauser, supra note 16.
[44] U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, supra note 26, at 14142.
[45] Kleck, supra note 18, at 57.
[46] Id. at 56.
[47] Cook, supra note 4.
[48] Understanding and Preventing Violence, supra note 15.
[49] McDowall & Wiersema, supra note 15.
[50] See, eg., Michael Hindelang et al., Measuring Delinquency (1981).
[51] See Jerald Bachman & Patrick O'Malley, When Four Months Equal a Year. Inconsistencies in Student Reports of Drug Use, 45 Pub. Opinion Q. 536, 539, 543 (1981).
[52] See Table 2.
[53] Mauser, supra note 19.
[54] Peter D. Hart Research Associates, Inc., Questionnaire used in October 1981 Violence in America Survey, with marginal frequencies (1981).
[55] See Table 1, note A.
[56] See Table 2, second column.
[57] Kleck, supra note 18, at 50 (extrapolating up to 1994, from 1987 data).
[58] David W. Moore & Frank Newport, Polic Strongly Favors Strongly Gun Control Laws, 340 The Gallup Poll Monthly 18 (1994).
[59] Quinley, supra note 36.
[60] Wright & Rossi, supra note 43, at 155.
[61] See Table 3, Panels A, E.
[62] The 85,000 DGUs estimated from the NCVS, divided by the 2.5 million estimate derived from the presented survey equals .03.
[63] Loftin & MacKenzie, supra note 27, at 22-23. [64] Computed from U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, supra note 26, at 82-83.
[65] Rand, supra note 17, at 2.
[66] Id.
[67] U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, supra note 26, at 126.
[68] 100%, minus the 16.6% where the victim was shot at, minus the 46.8% where the victim reported a "weapon present or threatened with a weapon" = 36.6%.
[69] 16.6% plus the 46.8% in the ambiguous "weapon present" category.
[70] Federal Bureau of Investigation, U.S. Department of Justice, Crime in the United States 1992--Uniform Crime Reports 18, 58 (1993).
[71] Philip J. Cook, The Case of the Missing Victims: Gunshot Woundings in the National Crime Survey, 1 J. Quantitative Criminology 91 (1985).
[72] U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, supra note 26, at 33.
[73] Kleck, supra note 18, at 57.
[74] Richard W. Dodge, The Washington, D. C Recall Study, in 1 The National Crime Survey. Working Papaer: Current and Historical Perspectives 14 (Robert G. Lehnen Wesley G. Skogan eds., 1981).
[75] Henry S. Woltman et al., Recall Bias and Telescoping in the National Crime Survey, in 2 The National Crime Survey. Working Papers: Methodological Studies 810 (Robert G. Lehnen & Wesley G. Skogan eds., 1984); Sudman & Bradburn, supra note 40.
[76] See Table 3, panel A.
[77] Rand, supra note 17.
[78] William A. Geller & Michael S. Scott, Police Executive Research Forum, Deadly Force: What We Know 100-106 (1993).
[79] Rand, supra note 17.
[80] See Table 3, Panel B.
[81] Id. at Panel C.
[82] Kleck, supra note 3, at 7-9; Kleck & Delone, supra note 3, at 75-77.
[83] U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, supra note 26, at 83.
[84] See Table 3, Panel F.
[85] For a related speculation, see Understanding and Preventing Violence, supra note 15, at 266.
[86] Id.
[87] U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, supra note 26, at 83; U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, supra note 70, at 18.
[88] See Table 3, Panel H.
[89] Id. at Panel A.
[90] Id. at Panel G.
[91] Id. at Panel I.
[92] Loftin & MacKenzie, supra note 27, at 22-23.
[93] U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, supra note 26, at 82.
[94] See Table 3, Panel J.
[95] Cook, supra note 4.
[96] See Table 3, Panel K.
[97] National Safety Council, Accident Facts 11 (1994). This assumes that 95% of "legal intervention" deaths involved guns.
[98] U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, supra note 26, at 25-26, 31, 38-39.
[99] Kleck, supra note 18, at 56.
[100] Arthur L Kellermann & Donald T. Reay, Protection or Peril?, 314 New Eng. J. Med. 1557 (1986).
[101] Kleck, supra note 18, at 11 1-117.
[102] See id. at 127-129 for a more detailed critique of these "junk science" statistics. See Understanding and Preventing Violence, supra note 15, at 267 for an example of a prestigious source taking such numbers seriously.

Bring it to the great state of Florida. The hogs are eating everything! All you need is a liscense. Open season year around, no limits, either sex or age. From Bar-b-Que size to feast size! They tear up the irrigation hose in the groves, either chew holes to drink or root under it. They root up the plastic ground cover and the tomatoes or squash or cucumbers on it, they root up the grass so the damm cows can't eat. And "most Importantly" they rootup the expensive landscaping in the millionaires gated communities!!!! AND......THEY ROOT UP THE GOLF COURSES. ( the bureaucrats call them "A Cultural Neccessity". That's interesting, pigs defending hogs.

The NRA and the gun lovers try to convince people that some people's champion is going to roar up the the scene Spiderman style and resolve any crime situation with a few shots from the magic criminal buster.
The trouble is little tale is just plain false.


http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2015/06/18/3671392/study-people-use-guns-self-defense/
But a timely study from the Violence Policy Center (VPC) concluded that guns are rarely used for defensive purposes. According to the most recent data that’s available, there were 8,342 criminal firearm homicides by private citizens (non-law enforcement members) in 2012 — as opposed to 259 justifiable homicides. In other words, there were 32 criminal homicides for every killing of a felon who was in the process of committing a crime. And 13 states reported zero justifiable homicides that year.


As noted by VPC, the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) observed a similar trend in previous years. Between 2007 and 2011, 29,618,300 people experienced a violent crime, but only 235,700 — 0.8 percent — of victims used or threatened to use a gun in self-defense. Findings from both the VPC and NCVS supplement studies verifying that more guns lead to more crimes.
Still, gun advocates keep arguing that guns are great for self-defense.
“The reality of self-defense gun use bears no resemblance to the exaggerated claims of the gun lobby and gun industry. The number of justifiable homicides that occur in our nation each year pale in comparison to criminal homicides, let alone gun suicides and fatal unintentional shootings,” the study reads. “The idea that firearms are frequently used in self-defense is the primary argument that the gun lobby and firearms industry use to expand the carrying of firearms into an ever-increasing number of public spaces and even to prevent the regulation of military-style semiautomatic assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines.”

This will piss you off, probably.
We are advised NOT to judge ALL Muslims by the actions of a few lunatics, but we are ENCOURAGED to judge ALL gun owners by the actions of a few lunatics. Doe's this seem fair? Not to me.
Here are a couple of statistics for you.
* Physicians versus gun owners
- 700,000 physicians in the US
- Accidental deaths caused by physicians annually is 120,000
(Department of HHS)
- Accidental deaths per physician is 0.171
* 80,000,000 gun owners in the United States
- Accidental gun deaths per year is 1,500
- Accidental deaths per gun owner is 0.000188
* Statistically, physicians are approximately 9000 times more dangerous
than gun owners
- Remember, "Guns don't kill people, doctors do"
* Fact: Not every one has a gun, but almost everyone has at least one
doctor
* Please alert your friends to this alarming threat
- We must ban doctors before this gets completely out of hand
Choke on it.

This will piss you off, probably.
We are advised NOT to judge ALL Muslims by the actions of a few lunatics, but we are ENCOURAGED to judge ALL gun owners by the actions of a few lunatics. Doe's this seem fair? Not to me.
Here are a couple of statistics for you.
* Physicians versus gun owners
- 700,000 physicians in the US
- Accidental deaths caused by physicians annually is 120,000
(Department of HHS)
- Accidental deaths per physician is 0.171
* 80,000,000 gun owners in the United States
- Accidental gun deaths per year is 1,500
- Accidental deaths per gun owner is 0.000188
* Statistically, physicians are approximately 9000 times more dangerous
than gun owners
- Remember, "Guns don't kill people, doctors do"
* Fact: Not every one has a gun, but almost everyone has at least one
doctor
* Please alert your friends to this alarming threat
- We must ban doctors before this gets completely out of hand
Choke on it.