for all the statistics and sources you'll ever need, check out:
http://www.gunowners.org
Specifically, check out the:
2001 FireArms Fact Sheet
It's a wealth of excellent information. For example,
Self-defense seems mythical in such cases: In 1997, for every time one woman fatally shot an intimate to save herself, 97 women were murdered by an intimate
The key phrase here is "every time one woman
fatally shot..."
What they don't tell you is that less than 8% of the time a gun is used in self defense, it is actually fired. Most of the time, one merely needs to brandish a weapon to ward off an attacker. So, what we have here is that 1 woman being the 8% of the time a gun is fired, and possibly 11 women who warded off an attack with the presence of a gun. TooBusy made a good point also. Of those 98 women, how many had ready access to a gun? And were they murdered with a gun, or was it done with a knife, strangling device, blunt object, etc. Conveniently, the article doesn't say.
