Oh one other thing. I'd just like to point out that, in Texas, the murder rate for 2016 among legal CCW gun owners was: 0.167 per 100k Chew on that for a while.
Yet the accusation is against people in Washington D.C. where almost nobody has concealed carry, and supposedly concealed carry permit holders are murdering people ? Evidence ?
That means nothing unless we know how many DGUs result in lives being saved. Tim Lambert estimates that 200 lives are saved if there are 80,000 DGUs: "In fact, only 0.35% of assaults result in death (Kleck table 5.. 0.35%*80,000=300 lives saved with guns each year. This is an overestimate since it assumes that guns are 100% effective and that all of the 80,000 crimes that guns were used to defend against were assaults when in fact some were robberies and burglaries (which have lower fatality rates than assaults). Correcting for these would give an estimate of more like 200." http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/1994/10/19/dgu-00007/ So 100k defensive gun uses would mean about 240 lives saved- still far less than the number of gun deaths in the US.
Clearly, lawful gun owners are not a problem. The problem are the unlawful gun possessors, as you already admitted. How does taking guns away from people who aren't a problem help stop crime.
Even if we were to assume that there were 3 million DGU's and each DGU was 100% successful in preventing a violent crime that would only mean about 10,000 lives are saved- still less than the total number of gun deaths.
And how many rapes and serious bodily injury would occur? Are you suggesting we should just allow ourselves to be beaten or raped while saying to ourselves "well, I only have a 0.35% chance of death so I'll just ride this out".
Not in Texas they didn't. Not a single CCW possessor in the 1.2 million group was charged with illegally transferring a weapon to a felon.
Owning a gun increases your chances of committing suicide, being killed by a family member, or dying in a gun accident. So it's best to find other ways to defend yourself.
Quantify that risk, along with all other risks. Quantify the total utility of firearms, not just self defense. Quantify the risk of owning a car or having ropes and bedsheets in your home.
Thanks to the private sale loophole they can get away with it without being charged. If questioned by LE later they can just claim ignorance about the felon's background.
No, it doesn't. The only thing that increases your chance of suicide is being suicidal. Gun ownership is not a cause of suicide. Someone who is already suicidal might indeed use the gun, but having the gun doesn't make being suicidal more likely. More people die falling out of their bed every year than gun accidents.
I think what you should have said is "I've never accepted any of the evidence provided to me numerous times over to support that claim"
Guns increase the probability that a suicide attempt will be successful. Gun owners don't attempt to commit suicide more often, but when they do they have a higher success rate. So they have an overall higher suicide rate.
