Largest Ever Survey of American Gun Owners Defensive Gun Uses

https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Guns_under_Jim_Crow_8_4_22.pdf


^ Peer reviewed and going for publishing, documented evidence that black gun ownership made lynchings go down. When black gun ownership was jeopardized by gun control, lynchings went right back up.

Why do gun control activists hate black people?

 

K, but what's it got to do with gun control that there's women who decide to live with violent psychopaths who end up killing them? Its certainly a tragic problem that we should see if there's a solution to, but its not a reason to increase regulation on veryone else because a few people make poor decisions for themselves.

 

Those results underline the practical challenges that legislators face when they try to eliminate "assault weapons" or "large capacity" magazines. The survey suggests that up to 44 million AR-15-style rifles and up to 542 million magazines with capacities exceeding 10 rounds are already in circulation.

As such, banning the manufacture and sale of these items will have no effect on any sort of gun-related crime.
Ineffective = unnecessary
Ineffective + unnecessary = infringement.

 

Read what I wrote:
"If defensive gun use is preventing violent victimization then the homicide rate should be lower. But it's not. It's higher."

So why aren't millions of defensive gun uses (whether they involve shooting the gun or not) resulting in fewer homicides? Maybe because that's a gross overestimate and the true number of dgu's is much lower. Maybe because using a gun to defend yourself is not a very effective means of self defense. Either way it doesn't look like dgu's are doing much good and the downsides of gun ownership outweigh any self defense benefits.

 

Because most law abiding victims of homicide aren't armed themselves. You can't have a DGU without being armed.

If DGUs are happening, that's one fewer potential homicide victim that doesn't get added to the total.

 

Lower than what? Is it not possible that our 'disarmed' homicide rate is much higher than our current homicide rate?

 

It absolutely can and should be part of the solution.

"Guns and domestic violence are a deadly combination. Every sixteen hours, a woman is fatally shot by her intimate partner in the United States; the mere presence of a gun in a domestic violence situation increases the risk of homicide for women by 500 percent."
https://scholar.smu.edu/law_faculty/810/

 

Lower than the homicide rate in gun free homes.

 

Not when the woman is holding the gun.
Why do you want to make it harder for women to defend themselves from abusive men?

 

Why do you want to make it easier for abusive men to victimize women?

 

What is the homicide rate in gun-free homes? How do you know?
What is the homicide rate in homes where a gun is present? How do you know?
Please demonstrate the necessary relationship between the presence of the gun and that (presumably) higher rate.

 

Oh look - you avoided my question.
I'll ask again:
Why do you want to make it harder for women to defend themselves from abusive men?
Well?

 

I don't see that a minority of women choosing to live with violent psychopaths getting stabbed or beaten instead of shot is a valid goal to use to justify increasing restrictions on everyone else. I'm hopeful that my daughter, being more confident in her own ability to protect herself (with a firearm), will prevent her from feeling like she needs to live with a violence-prone man in order to feel protected from the rest of the world. People just snapping 'out of the blue' and killing their wife or girlfriend without any previous history of abuse is anomalous. Most often, it happens in an escalatory manner, and as such, its unlikely that removing access to firearms will prevent the violence from escalating to murder anyway. The violent psychopaths that battered women tolerate will eventually escalate to a slightly more difficult means of murder, be it knife or unarmed. Trying to protect them with gun control isn't even a bandaid, its just a feelgood. They need to get out of that situation or the escalation will continue to its innevitable conclusion with or without guns in the household.

 

The homicide rate could very well be lower in gun free homes because potential home invaders don't know they are gun free homes. Its not unlikely that if we manage to reduce domestic shootings by removing guns from households (which I don't think would happen- see above post), home invasions will increase as criminals become less concerned about armed occupants. And maybe it isn't so for some people, but I am far more confident in my ability to prevent homicidal maniacs from living with me than I am from preventing them from smashing through my window at 3am. So the latter is what I need to be more prepared for, and by doing so, it also affords those in my community a measure of protection simply because my community as a whole is perceived to be (and actually is) a greater risk that many potential home invaders would prefer to avoid. However it happens, its common knowledge that more people where I live have guns at home than other areas. We also have much lower crime than other areas. This is admittedly not provably causal, but that's only because the dataset (like OP is attempting to establish) is so difficult to establish.

 

Since you can't pass laws to make homes gun free, it's a moot point.

 

35% of AR-15 owners have used the rifle for self defense outside their home, and 62% inside their home........sorry, but that's pretty hard to believe.

 

That makes no sense.

 

I've had two and neither was reported to the police.

 

You don't need a gun to kill someone that sleeps where you do.

 

I believe "outside the home" includes on property. "Public" was the category for areas outside of the home/property.

 

The largest and most comprehensive survey of American gun owners ever conducted suggests that they use firearms in self-defense about 1.7 million times a year.

Lets assume this is off by an order of magnitude, and there are only 170,000 defensive gun uses per year.
That's >16x more often than a gun is used to commit murder
That's >7x more often than a gun is used to commit suicide.

If defensive gun us is "rare", how then shall we describe the frequency with which a firearm is used to take a life?

 

That doesn't even make sense.

You don't know what the homicide rate would be without DGUs.

 

The homicide rate in gun free homes can be known.

 

It makes perfect sense.

"It is simply untrue that researchers cannot measure the nonfatal protective benefits of firearms, or that Kellermann's survey failed to detect such a benefit. If firearms deter, scare away or wound intruders, then the murder victimization rate of gun owners should be lower than non-gun owners. The absence of a gun in the home would have been recognized as a murder risk, rather than the presence of a gun."
http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-kellermann.htm

 

I do not want to make it harder for women to defend themselves. I want the opposite: Women can more easily defend themselves when their partners are not armed.