Defensive Gun Use

In the last couple of years the US has averaged around 40,000 deaths by firearm. Most of those are suicides which doesn’t make them any less meaningful. Somewhere around 30 people per year are killed in mass shootings.

These small numbers drive the gun control narrative. The idea is that if we could only remove guns from existence there would be no more people killed with guns. Q.E.D.

The problem with this viewpoint is that it is again a utopian vision. You are never going to remove firearms from the general populous much less the criminal population. You are never going to remove the knowledge of how to make firearms from the population.

Technology is so much better today it is much easier to make a firearm from scratch than ever before in history. Even crappy steel of today is so much better than the steels used with the first firearms. Removing guns from the population is wishful thinking, it isn’t going to happen.

The arguments of “Self defense is a right” also doesn’t work with the gun grabbers. They are true believers in the deity of government. They believe that only the government should have the right of violence. Only the government has the right to arrest, judge and punish a person.

This is why you will hear people screaming that the man shot dead by a bleeding beaten and raped woman should have had a trial. That it isn’t right for his victim, at the moment of the crime, shooting her rapist dead dead dead. The rapist hasn’t been convicted by a jury of his peers so he is only an alleged rapist. She took the law into her own hands and executed him without a fair trail.

Yes, there are times when mistakes are made. We are not talking about that. They aren’t talking about that. They aren’t talking about her shooting the wrong man. Of her shooting somebody that wasn’t involved. They are explicitly saying that a woman shooting the rapist with his cock in her body is her taking the law into her own hands. He should have been given a fair trial, not executed in cold blood.

As part of this hatred of people using force to defend themselves, there is also a huge industry in hiding the successful use of force or threat of force to defend yourself.

Lower-end estimates include that by David Hemenway, a professor of Health Policy at the Harvard School of Public Health, which estimated approximately 55,000–80,000 such uses each year

A May 2014 Harvard Injury Control Research Center survey about firearms and suicide completed by 150 firearms researchers found that only 8% of firearm researchers agreed that ‘In the United States, guns are used in self-defense far more often than they are used in crime’.[

Note that in the second quote they aren’t actually telling you the number of DGU per year, they are only telling you the opinion of 150 researchers. How those researchers were chosen will have an impact on that percentage. With a large number of “researchers” employed by gun control advocates, of course the number of “researchers” that believe that DGU out number criminal use of guns per year is going to be skewed.

Some of the issues with measuring DGU include:

• Nobody killed or wounded so no official record of the event
• Neither party reported the incident
• Memories of DGU will seem more recent than they are so “in the past year” might get response going back multiple years.
• People lying in surveys
• Survey questions being unclear
• Survey answers being discarded because researches can’t get outside confirmation

Regardless, nobody knows the real number and when the CDC published their number it was so high that they were told not to repeat the study.

A new report, published 2022-05-13 concludes that there were approximately 1.67 million DGU in 20221.

This report summarizes the findings of a national survey of firearms ownership and use conducted between February 17th and March 23rd, 2021 by the professional survey firm Centiment. This survey, which is part of a larger book project, aims to provide the most comprehensive assessment of firearms ownership and use patterns in America to date. This online survey was administered to a representative sample of approximately fifty-four thousand U.S. residents aged 18 and over, and it identified 16,708 gun owners who were, in turn, asked in-depth questions about their ownership and their use of firearms, including defensive uses of firearms.

Consistent with other recent survey research, the survey finds an overall rate of adult firearm ownership of 31.9%, suggesting that in excess of 81.4 million Americans aged 18 and over own firearms. The survey further finds that approximately a third of gun owners (31.1%) have used a firearm to defend themselves or their property, often on more than one occasion, and it estimates that guns are used defensively by firearms owners in approximately 1.67 million incidents per year. Handguns are the most common firearm employed for self-defense (used in 65.9% of defensive incidents), and in most defensive incidents (81.9%) no shot was fired. Approximately a quarter (25.2%) of defensive incidents occurred within the gun owner’s home, and approximately half (53.9%) occurred outside their home, but on their property. About one out of ten (9.1%) defensive gun uses occurred in public, and about one out of thirty (3.2%) occurred at work.
2021 National Firearms Survey: Updated Analysis Including Types of Firearms Owned