Allow me to jump right in and, well, agree with you.
However, to paraphrase Monty Python, simply saying “no it isn’t” is hardly a valid argument.
The number, 1.5 million, is usually stated as “estimates run as high as”, with the range usually given anywhere from 275,000 to 1.5 million.
So tell me, what is a valid number? How often are privately-owned firearms used to prevent crime?
Is it half the quoted number? 750,000? That too high for you? How about a quarter, or 375,000?
What constitutes a “prevented crime”? Actually capping the robber as he’s leaving the bank? Simply showing the gun to a would-be mugger, who then decides to go mug somebody less likely to be armed?
It’s like anti-lock brakes: how many lives do they save every year? How do you calculate a “save”? Do you figure every accident would have been a fatality? Of course not. But what percentage of them would have been, had the car not been able to stop quicker or more controllably? How would you tally such a thing, since nobody reports each and every near-miss?
How many “saves” can be attributed to firearms- used or just brandished- every year? How about ten? Hell, I can think of ten events the books refer to as “defensive gun uses” that either I or my immediate circle of friends and family were directly involved in. (With no shots fired and no police reports made, by the way. How would you record them?)
A Hundred? Hell, read a couple months’ worth of any fair-sized city’s police blotter and you’ll see a hundred DGUs.
A thousand? Nationwide? Even you, Minty, can probably agree that, with 300 million citizens and possibly 250 million firearms in the US, that at least a thousand instances of a legal, justifiable defensive use of a firearm occurs- whether or not a shot is fired.
Ten thousand? There’s ten thou suicides a year- are more people offing themselves than protecting themselves against muggers or convenience-store bandits? How many justifiable shootings occur every year? Do we assume that such shootings nearly equal the number of crimes in total, or are they a small fraction of crimes overall?
You’ve said that the “cons” of car ownership are outweighed by the “pros” of car ownership, and I agree. And as far as firearms are concerned, even if 35,000 people die by the gun every year (and that number, as already noted, involves suicides and accidents, and of the rest, a fair chunk are criminal-on-criminal shootings) if 35,500 are saved from death or injury, as callous as that sounds, that outweighs the negatives.
That latter number being one fortieth the quoted number you claim is erroneous. 275,000 “DGUs”, nationwide, per year, is not outside the realm of fantasy, and is knocking on the door of ten times the number of fatalities.
By how many orders of magnitude must the “pros” outweigh the “cons”, in your opinion?
