Yeah, but by the time you call the cops on someone who’s shooting someone else in a public place, it’s a bit too late.
So in 2017,there were just shy of 40,000 gun deaths, the highest total in half a century.
60% of these were suicides. That leaves 40%, or ~16,000 gun deaths, that were homicides (37%) or accidents.
The likelihood that there have been 20 to 25 life-saving DGUs for every homicide - I’m sorry, but that just defies common sense. The notion that there’s this huge wave of violence that ‘good guys with guns’ are quietly thwarting at almost every turn, and that without their courageous intervention, we’d have 350,000 or more homicides per year instead of 16,000 - wow. you guys are the American equivalent of the Dunedain of Middle-Earth, secretly keeping Hobbiton and Bree safe from the minions of the Dark Lord, year after year. Really quite astounding, if true. 
These ‘defensive use of guns’ simply don’t happen in the UK. Farmers and hunters who do have guns rarely, if ever, use their guns defensively, because they know they will face investigation and likely prosecution. Other members of the public simply don’t have guns. This cultural difference is entirely mystifying.
A DGU doesn’t necessarily need to be life saving. It would be wrong to think an event only qualifies as a DGU if it saves a life.
The problem is that these DGU numbers are ridiculous. They are impossible and don’t reflect reality. The claim is that DGUs prevent millions of crimes every year, and hundreds of thousands of deaths yet 2/3 of the population doesn’t even own a gun.
Why don’t those millions of crimes happen to non gun owners?
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
shrug
Gun advocates appear to believe that merely being within the aura of the Godlike Power of The Gun protects them from all harm - sort of like wearing a piece of the True Cross.
In the meantime, all they offer is anecdotes and “it stands to reason” as evidence.
I’ve completely given up on arguing with them, to be honest; no amount of evidence is sufficient to move them. They are far too wedded to their fear and paranoia to change.
I agree! But let’s re-read that quote I was responding to:
Good question. The numbers I’ve heard are that somewhere between 1/3 and 40% of Americans own guns. If 40%, then extrapolating from that 340K-400K number, the defenseless 60% of us ought to be the victims of between 510,000 and 600,000 homicides each year. And if 1/3, then between 680,000 and 800,000 of us should have been homicide victims each year.
But the actual number is <16,000.
Now I’ve heard the argument that gun owners keep the rest of us safer because the possibility of a gun in the house deters criminals. But if there’s such an effect, these numbers already incorporate its beneficial effects, because those 340K to 400K life-saving DGUs happened in the homes and businesses of gun owners. If this deterrent effect exists, what it does is to keep that 340K to 400K number from being a good deal larger than it is.
A somewhat more fact-based tally of gun use in America, based on actual reports, unlike the paper Dr. Seth keeps referring to. That one starts with the proposition that everyone knows that people won’t self-report DGU, so the NCVS is incorrect and needs to be inflated.
Does ‘not telling anyone that you haven’t got a gun’ count as a ‘defensive use of a gun?’ If not, the number of DGUs reported in Dr Deth’s link are utterly impossible.
Wow. And that doesn’t even taken into account the 100,000’s of gun deaths that presumably did occur (because victim lacked a gun) but which FBI overlooked in its stats. Wow.
You seem to have missed the context of this subthread. As reddened in the quote beginning this post, there were over 2 million DGUs of which “only” 340,000 or more allegedly “almost certainly saved a life.”
I wonder if the gun advocates in this thread will have the gumption to admit that those gun wielders perhaps just might have exaggerated the values of their DGUs?
I’m skeptical of that figure however it doesn’t say that 3-400k lives were saved, rather that that many people believed that to be so.
I think reporting that a DGU took place is more reliable than evaluating the potential outcome. The first can be a certainty while the latter is going to be supposition a great deal of the time.
Let’s not soft-pedal it: defenders believed that they had almost certainly saved a life by using the gun
Why are you expressing your skepticism to me??
I mean, I’m glad that you don’t buy into this claim either, but this is DrDeth’s cite in support of allegedly amazing positive effects of gun ownership. Your issue is with him.
So I was doing out the math. If the gun violence archive numbers are representative - that is, not ever police shooting, not every defensive gun use, and not ever offensive gun use is in these numbers, but statistically these numbers are representative of the real numbers, then if we add up the number of unintentional shootings, and multiple the suicides by some discount factor (many of the suicides would have occurred anyway, even if no guns, but not all), you would arrive at a ratio.
There’s some voids in the data so I can’t find the ratio. But say the ratio is 1:1. That is, for every defensive gun shooting, there’s an extra suicide or accidental shooting.
Just for the sake of argument. In that case, should no one have guns, since they are not leading to a net benefit? Well, if someone lives in an area where the violent crime rate is (bad shooting: good shooting) times the national average, statistically they will be better off with a gun. (they would be even better off moving to a safer area but may not be able to afford to)
And then I thought about it, and I realized there is one factor of interest that is missing from these numbers.
Open Carry. In areas with a lot of open carry, how often are the gun toters the victims of robberies and rapes and other violent felonies? If it’s an area with a lot of criminals, but everyone has a gun plainly visible, wouldn’t there be a strong deterrent effect?
How often does someone decide to try to mug or rape or rob a uniformed police officer? Everyone knows that if you threaten a police officer with a weapon, they will draw on you with the intention of killing you, and they will call for backup from their fellow officers.
lose-lose. I would imagine it almost never happens. So how often do people try to hold up a convenience store where the clerk has a visible firearm?
I will note my cite if from a highly respected senior jurist in a published legal opinion, so that is pretty damn solid. Where’s your cite that they didnt happen?
So you’re citing Gun Violence Archive (GVA), a clearly biased website? :rolleyes:
Not me, issue is with HON. ROGER T. BENITEZ United States District Judge.
An argument from authority. Right.
The DGU statistic makes no sense whatsoever. 57% of homes in the US do not possess guns. If there were 340,000 DGUs where the possession of a gun “almost certainly saved a life”, these must have occurred in the 43% of all households that do possess a gun.
Assuming a random distribution of such life-threatening events, then (57/43 x 340,000) such events should have occurred in homes where no-one has a gun. That’s 450,697 events.
Either 450 thousand events have occurred in such homes but have largely gone unreported
or
they haven’t.
Bear in mind these are events where a ‘gun saved a life’; this should be nearly half a million extra homicides.
I call bullshit.
Biased in what way? Show your work, DrDeth.
It’s only fair - here’s their methodology. What’s yours? How are you determining that they are wrong?
Ah, I see the old Adam Savage from Mythbusters cite: "I reject your reality and substitute my own."
Perfectly Ok to cite a expert as a authority.
The Judge cites a study:
7 See Gary Kleck & Marc Gertz, Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature
of Self–Defense with a Gun, 86 J. Crim. L. & Criminology 150, 164, 177 (1995) (cited in
Heller v. D.C. (Heller II), 670 F.3d 1244, 1262 (D.C. Cir. 2011)
Which is a peer reviewed study published in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology
https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=6853&context=jclc
footnoted and everything.
The other study the judge cited:*A Special Report by the U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice
Statistics published in 2013, reported that between 2007 and 2011 “there were 235,700
victimizations where the victim used a firearm to threaten or attack an offender.”8 *
Do note that there are:*In 2017, an estimated 1,247,321 violent crimes occurred nationwide. *
If there are 1,247,321 violent crimes a year, then guns preventing a mere 340,000 of them is perfectly possible. Note that pretty much, IMHO any violent crime prevented could be a life saving event. Perhaps they weren’t all lifesaving events, but no one claims they were.
But sure, you can reject the reality and call bullshit.
But those figures come from the Justice dept and a peer reviewed article by noted criminologists.