There’s two different things being combined in the DGU numbers thrown around here:
Anytime the gun is used to make the owner feel safer
Times the gun is used to prevent an actual attack
For #1, this would include everything from a guy in a bar wanting to start a fight to going to investigate a noise from a raccoon in the middle of the night. I could understand this number being 1M/year. If a gun owner gets his gun every time someone mistakenly pulls into his driveway, then this type of gun use probably happens a lot.
#2 is harder to quantify. This would be incidents where the gun was legitimately the reason the attack was stopped. If the owner did not have a gun, then they would have been attacked. The trouble is, we can’t depend on the numbers reported by gun owners. If an owner brandishes his gun when someone pulls into his driveway, we don’t know if the driver was a lost kid or a car full of professional hit men.
I think #2 could be approximated by looking at how often non-gun owners are physically attacked. I would suspect that gun and non-gun owners are attacked at pretty much the same rate. By knowing what percentage of non-gun owners were attacked, that would be a closer approximation of #2.
The bigger the number, then the greater disparity we should see between gun owners and non-gun owners in terms of safety. If gun owners are using their guns to protect themselves one million times per year, then non-gun owners who have no such protection should be getting mowed down like ants. Kellerman would have uncovered that in his studies, and if he hadn’t, someone would be along shortly to declare him a fraud.
Unfortunately for you, that’s not what reality looks like. In reality, non-gun owners are getting along just fine, and Kellerman proved that they’re actually better off.
Kellerman didn’t look at it because it’s irrelevant to the question at hand, which is, do guns make you safer? There’s no reason to count real or imaginary uses of guns being used for defense, all you need to do is look at how many times people with and without guns are killed or injured. Period.
Equally irrelevant are how many times intruders don’t hurt people and how many cases of defensive pots-and-pans use there are per year. Those numbers just don’t matter, a point that I keep making and you seem to keep missing.
I think you’re wrong, because no study I’m aware of has shown that to be the case. If you think that’s a realistic hypothesis, then surely some research has or could be done to back that up, right?
Until that research exists, all I know is that existing research which answers the important question, do guns make you safer, shows that they do not. Any attempt to shift the argument away from this question to meaningless things like DGUs or anecdotes or stupid youtube videos just reminds me that you’ve already lost the argument. Guns don’t make you safer. Full stop.
You see this as an instance where a gun kept you safe. I see it as an instance where a gun gave you the false confidence to approach the intruder. Why did you approach him at all? You put yourself in a situation where he was able to hit you with a 2x4, which could have killed you. What if he had a gun? Why would you consider approaching someone like that?
The only reason I would consider to approach an intruder is to save another person in the house. Otherwise, call 911 active the alarm bells, head out the bedroom window, and get away from him. Don’t give him the opportunity to get close enough to use a 2x4, much less a gun. Other than family, there’s nothing in my house worth dying for.
The fun part is that in many “research” studies (that is, ones that the NRA approves of, and has not lobbied to eliminated the funding for), you’ll find that the people who “self report” defensive gun use are actually the people that in reality are threatening or intimidating others with their guns.
For example, someone who is cut off in traffic, and then points their handgun at the “offending” driver at the next set of lights will report the incident as “I defended myself against a crazy driver with my trusty gun. Good thing I had it with me!”
Crap research will count this a a justifiable “defensive gun use”.
I haven’t seen the whole situation with Kable written in one post. From the bits I’ve read, he was woken up by someone breaking down his door. I’m assuming Kable and his girlfriend were in bed together. Instead of going to investigate, both of them could have established a defensive position in the bedroom with the gun or escaped through a window. If he had been disabled by the intruder’s 2x4, the girlfriend would be on her own. It’s a terrifying situation and I don’t mean to minimize what they went through, but there were non-gun responses which could have kept them safer.
If it happened the way he says it did, I’m perfectly fine with that as an example of legitimate defensive gun use.
I don’t for a minute believe it happened at all, though. Kable has proven to be a deceitful little piece of weasel shit, so the simpler explanation is that he is lying about it.
Agreed. But it may highlight a dichotomy between the views of guns do or don’t make you safer. Kable sees the situation as the gun made him safer, but he put himself in a more dangerous situation when he approached the intruder, and he was injured because of that. He would have been safer by fleeing the house and not allowing the intruder to attack him at all.
A lot would depend on the layout of the house. At my house, there’s only one way out; windows aren’t an option. So if it happened to me and my family, if I let him come to us, we’d be trapped. Not good. I would choose to investigate the noise as well since I’m familiar with my floorplan and presumably the intruder wouldn’t be. In the end, it’s a bad situation for all concerned and there are no good outcomes, only some that are not as bad as others depending on your point of view.
You cannot exit from your bedroom? What if your house was on fire? Fire codes require windows in bedrooms be useful for egress. Whether from intruder or fire, you should always be able to escape from your bedroom, although you may need an escape ladder if you’re on an upper floor. Assuming you’re in a house and not in a high-rise apartment building.
Of course that works both ways. Some biased people will denigrate any use of a gun as needless risk taking, or impugn the motives of those who do. You’d have to start with a pretty fair and balanced set of guidelines for just what is legitimate and what isn’t.
Forget about having armed guards at every school, after all that did nothing to prevent Columbine. Why don’t we have bullet proof vests issued to every student. An Arizona legislator thinks this is a good idea for he and his co-workers, why not do it for the students.
You shouldn’t make assumptions. I didn’t approach the intruder. I was still in bed when he assaulted me with the 2x4. I shot him from my bed. So do you really think I acted inappropriately? Without a gun do you think you could have faired any better? Cause I have to think without it, I’d have been bludgeoned to death in my bed and I doubt my girlfriend would have fared much better. Do you really think it impossible that a person who defends his life with lethal force to do so without bringing it on themselves?
Luckily he didn’t have a gun. Seems a lot of these home invaders do not, so current background checks must be doing something.
FWIW I didn’t have time to bust out my bedroom window, and my girlfriend was still in the house. Also I have to imagine that if my intruder followed me outside the house, shooting him wouldn’t have been near as open and shut a case of self defense.
Try getting woken up at 2:30 AM, it’s dark, and someone appears in your room before you can get out of bed and starts beating you with a 2x4. How quickly dexterously do you think you can raise the mini-blinds, open a window, remove the screen and climb out. My guess is without a gun, you would not make it.
If you read the Wiki on Kellerman you will see that some people did come by and did declare him a fraud. You should probably also consider that a number of people who own guns for self defense do so because they are at a higher risk in the first place.
Kellerman found an effect for handguns only, and he found they were were really only a risk for domestic violence situations. There was a non-significant trend in the data that would indicate those with long guns in the home were in fact a little better off.
Obviously you have not read the Kellerman study (and other research on the subject that finds, but does not play up, some of the same facts). Kellerman found homicides were much more likely to occur in households with a history of alcohol abuse, drug use, domestic violence, prior arrests. None of the confidence intervals included the 1.0 zero effect and all of these factors were more associated with homicide than even the ownership of handguns. If you read the paper you might come to the same conclusion that I did. That criminals should not own guns.
I am working on it though (my body, not my windows).