I notice that one of the top arguments in gun debates (both handguns and long arms) in the US in support of weapons is that they are needed for self defence. Either defence of the home, or to be carried when out and about for personal defence.
In my quest to be informed on the issue, I’m looking for, but haven’t been able to locate, any actual statistics on the number of incidents where an individual has defended himself and/or his home through use of a firearm. Presumably these incidents would be attended by police for an investigation, so I’m presuming some form of stats would be kept?
A google search for “the armed citizen” will provide links the the NRA’s published articles that appear in their magazine each month. Additionally there is a web site www.thearmedcitizen.com that tracks the data.
In many cases the presence of a firearm in the hands of the intended victim ends the encounter with no police attendance.
Most incidents are never reported, so official figures are seriously low.
Presumably investigated by police? Bullshit. I displayed a firearm five times from 1992 to 2003 to disuade people from breaking into my house when they knew I was there. The last time I had to go fetch the gun after the sight of me with a butcher knife in one hand and the phone calling 911 in the other hand didn’t stop him from trying to break down my door. Yes, the police were called. They drove by and never stopped…45 minutes later. Yeah, great job. I would have been dead on my floor for days before someone found me.
On another occasion I displayed a firearm to stop two guys from mugging me at an isolated wayside rest at 6:30am on a Sunday morning.
The only time the police are going to investigate are when someone gets shot or shots are fired, primarily so they can decide who to charge. When no shots are fired, they largely couldn’t give a fuck.
Six incidents in an 11 year period of living in a not-so-nice neighborhood and while traveling. Zero in the 9 years since. What that means for me is that I have a fair bit of personal experience on the ‘guns as self-defense’ front and when anti-gunners minimize, lie or spread false information about how prevalent it is, I kinda take offense at them talking out of their asses.
Studies of defensive gun use have come up with widely varying numbers. From a high of 2.5 million/year to a low of 108,000/year.
The page contains links mostly surrounding a 1993 study headed by Gary Kleck, a Florida State University criminologist. There are mentions of 13 other studies and links to criticisms of Kleck’s methodologies.
The question is a little more complicated than you might think. Do you exclude gun use in defending yourself against a wild animal? Does the gun have to have been fired? Say someone is threatening you with a knife, you point your gun at him and he runs away. Does that count? What about the same situation where you just tell the attacker you have a gun (and you do but it’s not showing) and he runs.
That should get you started. If you want to look around just search for ‘Annual US defensive gun use’.
When I first posted I was thinking of cases where shots had been fired. Hence why I presumed police would be involved. But just brandishing a firearm counts as well for what I’d like to know.
Kind of derailing my own thread here, but I have to ask, From your personal experience Chimera, why would you not call police if someone was trying to break into your home? Even after you scared off the intruder by displaying your gun?
And with the attempted mugging, surely that would have been worth a call to police to let them those people were in the area?
This isn’t an attack or anything, I’m genuinely interested in the situations you describe.
I’ll admit, this is the first thing that came into my mind when I read Chimera’s post, too. Who in their right mind drives off an intruder and *doesn’t *call the cops afterward?
According to Chimera’s post, he did call the police.
The last time I had to go fetch the gun after the sight of me with a butcher knife in one hand and the phone calling 911 in the other hand didn’t stop him from trying to break down my door. Yes, the police were called. They drove by and never stopped…45 minutes later.
Since it’s illegal to carry a gun in Chicago, Ill and you will be arrested for carrying a gun, why would you notify the police that you displayed a firearm and the criminal ran away? The criminal didn’t actually finish committing an illegal act and is now nowhere to be found. You, on the other hand, have admitted violating the law and have given your name and address to the police. Say, “Hi” to your fellow cell mates.
I believe there were several newspaper polls conducted decades ago that indicated that millions of people had used, but not neccessarily discharged, firearms to prevent crimes. You might want to read “More Guns, Less Crime” by John Lott for a better understanding of the situation.
Well, if you read his post, Chimera did call the police (who responded with a blazingly fast 45 minute response time).
But to answer your question - people who live in very high crime neighborhoods often don’t, as the police are so busy dealing with “serious” crimes that they won’t do anything about a mere attempted break-in. (Or even an actual burglary, although for that they will put in a perfunctory appearance.). It’s just a waste of everyone’s time.
One sign you’re living in a lower-crime area is that the police actually take “small” crimes such as unsuccessful break-ins seriously.
I got the impression from his post he didn’t bother except for the last time. But I obviously stand to be corrected, that was just my first impression.
Maybe I just don’t get what a ‘high crime’ area in the States is like. I can’t fathom an attempted break in not getting any (or just perfunctory) police intervention. I had my car broken into early this year, while it was parked in my backyard, and I had a police car out to my place within about 20 mins, and the forensics van around the next day on the off chance they could get some usable prints off the car interior (non usable as as it turns out - Damn you CSI! - according to the police tech it is actually rare/difficult to get usable prints off the surfaces inside a car).
I had my car broken into in the city. I went over to talk to a cop that was sitting in a nearby parking lot and he told me to call some city phone number to report it.
In a high crime area in the US, the police are forced into triage. They’re expending most their effort trying to solve crimes of violence. They’ll give an actual burglary some attention, since property is missing and there was a potential for violence if the burgler had met the homeowner, but their investigation tends to be perfunctory since they know the chances of actually solving the crime is low. An attempted break-in, where no one got hurt, nothing’s missing, and the homeowner can give at best a minimal description of the suspect? That’s very low on their priority list.
When I lived in Sweden a mere burglary would not make the police show up. Standard procedure was that the home owner would be told to come by the police station (during business hours) and fill out a report for the insurance company. Maybe that has changed since the 90’s when I lived there.
Outside cities in Sweden the nearest police patrol car can be an hour away. Rural Sweden is very sparsely populated and there may only be a few police cars for quite a large area. If none happen to be close, you wait.
I now live an a fairly low-crime area in the US. I had my burglar alarm go off on a false alarm once and had a police car outside my door in less than 5 minutes. I was quite impressed.
I’ve been skeptical of stats posted by the NRA ever since they misrepresented crime figures for Australia.
Wikipedia:
The 2.5 million defensive gun uses a year figure mentioned above is a gross exaggeration, of course. It gets worse when the figure is misrepresented as lives saved.
BigAppleBucky posted an interesting analysis of justified homicides, which are probably the only reliable stat you’re going to get on the use of firearms for personal defense. It was ignored in the thread where it was originally posted, despite being, IMO, the best thing in it.
Once, I scared off someone prowling around my house. After the fact, there was zero evidence anyone had been there, let alone who it might be. The cops would have, at most, taken a statement from me, filed it in a file cabinet somewhere, and done nothing else. They likely wouldn’t even do that much, just have a look around, confirm there’s no one there anymore, call a ‘nothing to see, here’ in on the radio, and leave. No paperwork to fill out, that way. There was no point in wasting my time to do that, since I heard the person running away through the woods, already. That’s the situation in most incidents where a criminal is chased way with no shots fired. Consequently, most such incidents are never reported. Most people can’t be bothered, when the cops are going to do nothing about it.
No, ‘worst case’ was that, these being Minneapolis cops, they would arrest me for “brandishing” (based on my own report), confiscate my gun and turn my house upside down looking for anything else they could charge me with.
As it was, the last time when I told the 911 operator that the guy stopped, looked at me and went back to battering my door; so I was going to put the phone down and get my gun, she attempted to ORDER me not to.
And like I said, the cops drove down the alley and kept right on going a full 45 minutes later. They never stopped, they never came up to the house, nothing.
After that, I wouldn’t have called the Minneapolis cops for anything short of coming out to clean up bodies.
OK, you have me there. I was (and still am) in a low-crime, rural area of NY State. The cops would not have cared that I had a loaded shotgun. I assume, probably correctly, that most of my neighbors do, too. So would the cops. It was almost certainly some idiot looking for an empty house to break into and see what he could steal. Maybe a neighbor’s kid. The prowler almost certainly had a brown streak in his underwear that he had to go home and clean up, instead of going to break into some other house, after hearing/seeing me rack the shotgun and point it his way. A herd of elephants would have run away more quietly :D.
