Gun and self-defense statistics that might surprise you -- and the NRA

By Scott Martelle

Jun 19, 2015 | 11:35 AM



Kearston Farr hugs her daughter Taliyah, 5, at a memorial in front of the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., on Friday. (Curtis Compton / Atlanta Journal Constitution)


As was predictable, some of the NRA crowd blames the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, the murdered pastor of Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, for the deaths of eight parishioners Wednesday because as a South Carolina state legislator he supported stricter gun control (the original comment by NRA Director Charles L. Cotton seems to have been taken down, but was preserved elsewhere).
Beyond the despicable efforts to blame the victim and not the alleged gun-toting racist charged with the crimes, Cotton's assertion reflects a common and romanticized argument by the gun lobby. If we were all armed, we would all be safe, an argument as devoid of humanity as it is of logic.
Coincidentally, just 13 hours before those atrocious killings, the Violence Policy Center released a fresh analysis of federal crime and health data that explores how often potential victims actually turned the tables. Parsing 2012 numbers, the center counted 259 justifiable gun-related homicides, or incidents in which authorities ruled that killings occurred in self-defense.
That's in a nation in which there are some 300 million firearms, nearly one for every person (though only a little over a third of Americans own guns — and there's an interesting take on that here, and on the ramifications of gun ownership on murder rates here, and while you're reading links, this is of interest, too). This is also a nation in which, in 2012, there were 1.2 million violent crimes, defined as murder, forcible rape, robbery and aggravated assault. Or, put another way, 1.2 million scenarios in which there was potential for someone to kill in self-defense.


Oh, and match those 259 justifiable homicides with the theft of about 232,000 guns each year, about 172,000 of them during burglaries. That's a ratio of one justifiable homicide for every 896 guns put in the hands of criminals.
Those 259 justifiable homicides also pale compared with, in the same year, 8,342 criminal homicides using guns, 20,666 suicides with guns, and 548 fatal unintentional shootings, according to the FBI's Supplemental Homicide Report. The ratio for 2012, per the Violence Policy Center, was one justifiable killing for every 32 murders, suicides or accidental deaths (the ratio increases to 38-1 over the five-year period ending in 2012). That's a heavy price to pay.
The center also dives into the thorny thicket of how often the presence of a gun stops a crime — either violent or against property, such as a burglary — from happening. The gun lobby trots out an annual figure of 2.5 million such instances. But an analysis of five years' worth of stats collected by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics' National Crime Victimization Survey puts the number much, much lower — about 67,740 times a year.
It's also useful, as the Violence Policy Center does, to dig into the relationships among the attackers and those who kill in self-defense. Over the five-year span ending in 2012, more than half — 56% — of the justifiable homicides involved strangers, and in 11% of the cases, the relationship was not reported. The rest were acquaintances (18.7%) such as neighbors and coworkers, and then a mishmash of relatives and personal relationships.
Conversely, of the 2012 criminal firearm homicides in which a relationship was reported, three out of four victims knew their killers, and more than a third were family members or "intimate acquaintances" — such as spouses, ex-spouses or others involved in a romantic relationship.
And those suicides? About half of all suicides are committed with guns, and seven in 10 by men, who also account for 74% of gun owners in the country.
Oddly, given these combined statistics, nearly half of gun owners say they keep weapons because it makes them feel safer, a proportion that has increased dramatically since 1999 even though violent crime has been in a steady decline.
So what conclusions can we draw from this? The notion that a good guy with a gun will stop a bad guy with a gun is a romanticized vision of the nature of violent crime. And that the sea of guns in which we live causes exponentially more danger and harm than good. It's long past time to start emphasizing the "well-regulated" phrase in the 2nd Amendment.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/10/2018 04:33AM by riverhousebill.

Wrong again, Libs.

The VPC - Violence Policy Center - analysis and statistics cited in the article you posted are Bogus -

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June 26, 2015

New Gun Study Misses the Point on Self-Defense, and Uses Bad Data to Boot

[www.cato.org]

"A recent report from Violence Policy Center purports to show that private gun possession results in many more criminal firearm homicides than justified killings, a conclusion that was quickly picked up by several media outlets. But it isn’t so much a report as it is a handful of woefully incomplete data sets thrown together with a few conclusory remarks.

The essential thrust of the report is that, according to FBI homicide reporting figures, there were only 259 justified firearm homicides in 2012 compared with 8,342 criminal homicides by firearm. Ergo, the authors posit, it’s clear that private gun possession does much more harm than good, and that the claims of self-defense and Second Amendment advocates of thousands of defensive gun uses annually are wildly false.

Readers should first acquaint themselves with Brian Doherty’s excellent work over at Reason surveying the long-running debate regarding how we should conceive of defensive gun uses. Contrary to the implications of gun control advocates, the positive utility of a firearm for self-defense should not be limited to the bad guy body count:

Believe it or not, guns can and do help ensure personal safety or at least provide an insurance policy of sorts toward the time one might want or need to ensure your or your family’s personal safety even if you don’t actually plug some human varmint dead.

Certain anti-gun folk seem to sincerely believe that the only reason Second Amendment advocates want to have a gun, or want other people to have the right to have a gun, is because guns are so great at killing people; that a gun not used to kill someone isn’t really worth having. But it isn’t true.

But we have plenty of reason to believe that Americans use a gun in the service of deterring a crime or potential crime over 2 million times a year. That does not require killing someone with the gun—about three-fourths of the time the gun does not need to be fired much less kill to deter. That should be blindingly obvious to anyone not looking for some new “scientific” excuse to disarm Americans.

Even accepting the scope of the study, there are still problems. First and foremost, the study uses unreliable data. The FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Reports, from which the number of justified homicides was tabulated by the VPC, are voluntary submissions from state and local law enforcement agencies. The vast majority of law enforcement agencies do not participate, and the data that does come in is often unreliable. For example, several instances of justified homicides were reported to the FBI as criminal homicides.

For more than a dozen states, the FBI received no data at all on justified firearm homicides by civilians between 2008 and 2012, while only four states (Texas, California, Michigan, and Tennessee) account for nearly half (44%) of the reported justifiable gun deaths. Instead of deciding that the dearth of reliable data should breed hesitation, the authors arrive at a figure that implies there were no justified firearm homicides in non-reporting states during the study period.

A quick glance at Cato’s map of defensive gun uses would have shown the authors several justified firearm homicides in those states.

Lastly, the VPC study makes absolutely no effort to distinguish the legality of the firearm possession that led to the homicide. Insofar as these figures are being used to advocate for additional gun control regulations, isn’t it pretty important to distinguish the guns that are illegally-owned and thus not subject to regulation in the first place? The VPC’s own website reports fewer than 200 criminal homicides by licensed firearm carriers over the entire eight year period between 2007 and 2015. That’s a far cry from 8,234 per year, and yet that data point didn’t make it into the study.

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All that said, it’s important not to get lost in a statistics war over a fundamental right. As Brian Doherty notes:

The opposing armies in the [defensive gun use] war are roughly staked out with these dueling positions: 1) “There are a really large number of defensive gun uses, so many that any reasonable person would have to admit that private gun ownership is some kind of social good” and 2) “While there may be a fair number of DGUs, the number is dwarfed by the number of violent crimes committed with guns, so never mind the people who save themselves with guns, we should let politicians concentrate not on speculative and uncertain defensive uses, but on the crimes and loss of life and limb that we can see and count which accompanies gun possession and use.”

Left out of any policy decision based on these sorts of macrostatistics, as always, is how much having a gun mattered to the specific individual person able to defend himself.

However large the number of DGUs, or how small; and however large the number of accidents or tragedies caused by guns, or how small, the right and ability to choose for yourself how to defend yourself and your family—at home or away from it—remains, and that numerical debate should have no particular bearing on it."

Also, I refer you to this post, which article by Reason website gives the more Accurate (there are no totally accurate statistics for DGU) count of Defensive Gun Use by the CDC and Kleck -

[www.rawfoodsupport.com]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/10/2018 03:39PM by Jennifer.

The VPC - Violence Policy Center - used bogus numbers in calculating concealed crimes committed by concealed carry holders, also.

Bogus Gun-Control Numbers

[www.nationalreview.com]

To prove that concealed handguns are dangerous, the Violence Policy Center cooks the books.


People walking the streets armed with guns are dangerous, right? With all 50 states finally allowing concealed handguns to at least some degree and with over 11 million Americans now having permits to carry them, this question ought to have been settled. In fact, despite continued attacks by gun-control organizations, permit holders almost never commit violent crimes with their guns.

Nonetheless, this past week, just in time for the NRA convention, gun-control advocates were at it again, touting ridiculous charges that concealed-carry permits were responsible for 636 deaths nationwide over the seven years from May 2007 to March 2014.

The Violence Policy Center regularly puts out these bogus charges in a report called “Concealed Carry Killers.” But how does it claim to arrive at these numbers?

The VPC collects cases of permit holders’ abusing their permitted concealed handguns for each state. For Michigan, for example, it cites state-police reports on permit holders indicating that 185 died from suicide during the period 2007 through 2012. Surely some alarm bells should have gone off, with Michigan suicides supposedly making up 29 percent of all 636 deaths nationwide the VPC attributed to permitted concealed handguns.

But more importantly, the suicides are not in any meaningful way linked to the issue of carrying a permitted concealed handgun outside of one’s home. If you look at page 2 in the latest report from the Michigan State Police, you will see that in the listing of suicides, there is no indication of specific cause of death. The report merely notes that 56 permit holders committed suicide, without saying whether any or all of them used a gun. Interestingly, the suicide rate among permit holders in Michigan in 2010 (13.3 per 100,000 permit holders) is lower than the rate in the general adult population (16.30). But typically suicides — with or without guns — take place at home. So, again, what would these numbers have to do with the concealed-carry debate?

Now a look at the murder and manslaughter statistics as presented by the Violence Policy Center report. These cases would surely be relevant, but they are not counted correctly.

In other words, during 2007–08, five cases were pending and there were no convictions. The Violence Policy Center makes several fundamental mistakes. First, it can’t add simple numbers up correctly. While the VPC claims 20 pending cases and 14 convictions, the Michigan State Police report a total of 14 and 11 cases respectively.

Secondly, since it can take years for a murder case to go to trial, some of the homicides may have occurred well before 2007. In addition, the Michigan State Police report doesn’t provide information on how the murder was committed, so gun murders make up only a portion of this total.?

Third, and perhaps the worst mistake, the Violence Policy Center actually adds the “pending” and “conviction” numbers together. Convictions are obviously what should be counted. After all, some of the “pending” cases do not result in a conviction, and adding them more than doubles the total number.

There is even more numerical nonsense. The Violence Policy Center then adds in twelve cases that were reported in newspapers and other media over the same years. However, those cases had already been counted in the official statistics by the Michigan State Police.

It seems the Violence Policy Center piles on any numbers that it can get hold of, anything that can be related to concealed-carry holders. For instance, it counts legitimate self-defense cases in which no charges were filed or the permit holder was charged and later exonerated.

All in all, the VPC has managed to triple-count claimed cases of permit holders killing people, and the vast majority of cases it includes in its list — such as legitimate self-defense shootings or suicides not related to permitted concealed handguns — shouldn’t be counted to begin with.

Yet, put aside all these problems for a moment. Assume, for the sake of argument, that the Violence Policy Center’s claim that concealed-handgun permits were responsible for 636 deaths in seven years is correct. One has to note that there are over 11 million concealed-handgun permits in the U.S. right now. With an annual number of deaths of 90, that means 0.00083 percent of concealed-carry permit holders were responsible for a shooting death each year. Removing suicides from the total reduces the rate even more, to 0.00058 percent.

The conjuring up of bogus numbers like these has become a mainstay of gun-control groups. That also includes the “studies” financed by Michael Bloomberg’s millions.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/11/2018 06:19PM by Jennifer.

This is not bogus, these figures are a fact of life you just cant spin away.
This is not just one study.

Jennifer The NRA and people like yourself need to stop bullshiting everyone


“When a country with less than five percent of the world's population has nearly half of the world's privately owned guns and makes up nearly a third of the world's mass shootings, it's time to stop saying guns make us safer.”

Look at the source Jennifer quotes from- National Review.

Jennifer you be better off quoting from FOXMOO'S

Cant you do better than the Review?


Really Tim Buckley, Next Joke Jennie

National Review ‘Crap,’ ‘Silly, Right-Wing Nonsense’

You're not allowed to criticize my source when you don't provide a link to your source.

National Review is a perfectly reliable source. Founded by William F. Buckley, Jr.

[en.wikipedia.org]

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Here is the link to your article -

[www.latimes.com]

No wonder you didn't post a link - because if you read the comments in your article, you'll see the commenters are mostly against gun control and are calling out the article and VPC for their Bogus numbers.

So you post an article about bogus numbers of DGU in which are contained bogus numbers of DGU ...

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(The comments from your gun control article) -

This article even admits that there are over twice as many instances of guns warding off crime than fatal gun crimes committed. Take suicide out, because it's definitely not the guns that are the problem there, and now the crimes pale in comparison to the frequency of stopped crimes.

Here is something the liberal press , anti gun people FAIL to mention, how many times has a gun owner stopped a crime without having to fire their weapon ?? I would bet a lot more than they would care to admit. Gun owners do NOT want to kill anyone, pulling the trigger is the last thing we want to do. But the liberal press, anti-gun people, and democrat politicians do not admit that.

Mr Martelle should know that "regulated" in 1700s meant to be uniform like a pressure regulator. They wanted to ensure that allowing the population to carry out that God given right to defense would best serve the nation if there were no restrictions (shall NOT BE INFRINGED) so they would have similar - regular ammo and weapons to what the common soldier would have. Think the Swiss or the Israelis who have the military full auto rifles in their bedrooms. That is precisely what our founders desired. It was Roosevelt in 1937 that managed a Supreme court coup de ta that resulted in a complete redefinition of that word 'regulate' to 'micro-manage' - the opposite of the intention in 1779.

Gun statistics that might surprise you, that The Times knows of, but hides for their politics. In 2017, Chicago alone had 650 murders and many more shootings. Inner cities continue to be the locations of the vast majority of "violent gun crimes." Yet, this publication and other MSM completely ignore that massive volume for their political agenda. As most of those victims are young, African-American males, this proves that the media really cares more for politics than Black lives.

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Damn... those inconvenient Truths published under Eric Holder: "Blacks (46%) comprised a higher percentage of murderers than Hispanics (27%) or whites (23%)."

U.S. Department of Justice
Violent Felons in Large Urban Counties
July 2006, NCJ 205289

What do New Orleans, Detroit, St. Louis, Baltimore, Oakland, Kansas City, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Memphis, Buffalo, Washington DC, Stockton, Miami, Milwaukee, and Pittsburgh have in common other than large black populations?

All controlled by Democrats and with huge barriers to honest citizens to have firearms leaving only bad guys with guns

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"in 2012, there were 1.2 million violent crimes, defined as murder, forcible rape, robbery and aggravated assault. Or, put another way, 1.2 million scenarios in which there was potential for someone to kill in self-defense."

Put another way, there were 1.2 million scenarios where someone needed a gun but didn't have one.

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So just in case the current event in Florida doesn't get the public in the proper mind set, The LAT posts this opinion piece from 2015 to increase the noise factor.

Those 'justifiable' homicides don't include how many criminals ran out the door the moment they saw an armed home owner. Or how many got shot and managed to escape. In Canada these types of stats are not kept because the number is skewed due to the fact that most home owners will not report such incidences unless there is a homicide.

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The lie of this article is a simple one.

It presumes that the ONLY type of self-defense situation that counts is where the defender shoots and kills the attacker.

Apparently shooting and injuring the attacker doesn't count

And clearly just pulling the gun and having the attacker change their mind doesn't count as self-defense.

And yet, according to the CDC's 2014 report to the White House, there are between 500,000 to 3,500,000 DGUs (Defensive Gun Uses) annually in the US. When one considers that less that 200,000 people are actually shot each year in the US, that leaves a lot of DGUs where no one gets shot.

But, to the gun controllers, if no one is shot and a crime is stopped, then it doesn't count as self-defense.

Can't be more dishonest than that.

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As was predictable, the LAT had to run an anti-gun article.

So I guess you don't wear your seat belt either. Stats also show that there is an unlikely percentage that you will get into a car accident in your lifetime where you would need a seat belt to save your life. Yes, there is an unlikely chance of someone trying to enter my home and do my family harm, but I prefer to wear my seat belt... I'm sure you will argue that the seat belt also prevents potential minor injuries from being major injuries and your're 100% right. So will you ask the person that enters your home to just do minor damage to you? I mean, it's only fair right? You don't have a gun, so why should they harm you in a major way? Oh yeah, that's right, criminals don't care about your political affiliations, your liberal spirit, your peace-loving outlook on life, your stats, your cold hard facts, you, your family or anything else about you for that matter. If they did, they wouldn't be criminals. I am not willing to become a statistic. The ACTUAL cold hard fact is that YOU DON'T NEED A GUN... UNTIL YOU NEED A GUN. Stew on that for a while.

40 is murder rate in Detroit, 80% black.
_4 is murder rate in Seattle, _8% black.
Your statistics are far too generic to apply.

The only number you cite is justified homicides, which seems to be a pretty poor metric of how people are able to defend themselves from attackers/burglers/whatever. Far more often is the simple fact of having the gun and letting them know you have it is enough to scare them off, and when that doesn't work people are injured far more often than they are killed. The numbers you do touch on for that aren't substantiated and shown how they're better than the NRA statistics, and 67,000 prevented burglaries and violent attacks is huge, 8 times larger than the amount of homicides with a gun. Also, using suicide numbers is really dumb. They have nothing to do with self defense. Also the 1.2 million number you cite about how many people had a chance to kill in self defense includes people who don't carry, who, for all we know, may be far more likely to experience a crime like that because they don't carry. Accidental deaths are probably easier to ascribe to people like you, who's probably barely touched a gun in their life, who hasn't taught themselves or their family gun safety. So the conclusion we can draw is that having a gun is very good for preventing crime against yourself and your property and far outweighs the negatives that you talk about. And either way, taking someone's right to obtaining what they need to defend themselves away is immoral and unconstitutional.

Interesting numbers, but it seems irrelevant to me. Having a firearm certainly does not mean you will not be killed but not having a gun most likely means you will. I also believe the number of justifiable homicides would be much higher had each of those 8,342 individuals that were killed had possessed a gun at the time. There are just too many variables involved.

Not a country music fan, I like Greatful Dead Led Zep folk, But now I think I will have to check out country music singer Eric Church.
Its refreshing to see some one with clear vision - NRA and Insane Gun Culture In America.


Country Music Star Eric Church Calls Out NRA Over Las Vegas Massacre: ‘I Blame The Lobbyists’
“We could have stopped the guy in Vegas.”



Country music star Eric Church is calling out the gun lobby for blocking efforts to reduce gun violence, especially mass shootings.

“I blame the lobbyists,” Church told Rolling Stone. “And the biggest in the gun world is the NRA.”

Eric Church was a headliner at the Route 91 Harvest festival last year, the same event where a mass shooting claimed the live

Eric Church was a headliner at the Route 91 Harvest festival last year, the same event where a mass shooting claimed the lives of 58 people.
Church was one of the headliners at the Route 91 Harvest festival in Las Vegas last year, and performed on Sept. 29. Two nights later, Stephen Paddock opened fire on fans attending the festival from his room at the Mandalay Bay hotel. He killed 58 people and injured some 800 others. Church’s fans were among the victims.

“It wrecked me in a lot of ways,” Church told Rolling Stone. “Something broke in me that night, and it still hasn’t healed. There’s a part of me that hopes it haunts me forever.”

Church, who’s a gun owner, described himself as “a Second Amendment guy.”

“That’s in the Constitution, it’s people’s right, and I don’t believe it’s negotiable. But nobody should have that many guns and that much ammunition and we don’t know about it. Nobody should have 21 AKs and 10,000 rounds of ammunition and we don’t know who they are. Something’s gotta be done so that a person can’t have an armory and pin down a Las Vegas SWAT team for six minutes. That’s @#$%& up.”

However, Church also supports gun control measures such as closing the gun-show loopholes, improving background checks and banning bump stocks.

“As a gun guy, the number of rounds [the shooter] fired was un-@#$%&-believable to me,” he said. “I saw a video on YouTube from the police officer’s vest cam, and it sounded like an army was up there. I don’t think our forefathers ever thought the right to bear arms was that.”

Church blamed the NRA for blocking reform.

“There are some things we can’t stop,” he said. “Like the disgruntled kid who takes his dad’s shotgun and walks into a high school. But we could have stopped the guy in Vegas.”