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FreeRepublic , LLC PO BOX 9771 FRESNO, CA 93794
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Posted on 07/15/2003 10:39:53 AM PDT by 45Auto
When I debated a representative from the Brady Campaign recently, like clockwork, one of the most disreputable pieces of “research” was presented as fact. Namely, “If you have a gun in your home you are 22 times more likely to be injured by it than kill an attacker.”
There are two important fallacies in this statement. Students of self-defense have found that as much as 95 percent of the time all that is necessary to change an attacker's mind is to brandish a gun. Even if the criminal has one, he is likely to leave when he sees his victim pointing a gun back at him. Killing an attacker is hardly the only measure of a successful defensive gun use.
Secondly, two-thirds of the victims of crime who end up getting killed or assaulted have a criminal background themselves, and nearly 60 percent of the victims know (or knew) their assailant. These data published by the San Francisco Firearm Injury Reporting System for the year 1999 suggest that a lot of crime in this country involves thug-on-thug violence.
The San Francisco data also report that nearly two-thirds of the wounded criminals broke the law within two years.
Criminals who were shot suffered multiple gunshot wounds twice as often as good guy victims. This suggests that the criminals who were victims were shot over a “business” matter in their criminal enterprise. In other words, their competitor(s) really wanted them out of the criminal market. Victims with a criminal history were injured as a result of a robbery twice as often as those without a criminal history.
The anti-self-defense lobby wants us to think that guns make good guys go bad. As we can see from just the San Francisco data, most crime victims are far from being choirboys. And of course, other data tell us that their attackers are not in the choir either.
A Philadelphia think tank (Public/Private Ventures) conducted a survey of individuals who were arrested for murder in that city during 1996-1999. The survey found that 90 percent of the suspected murderers had a criminal history.
Don Kates, in an article entitled “Do Guns Cause Crime?” (Center for History and News Media, July 2, 2002), reports that “Though only 15% of Americans have criminal records, roughly 90 percent of adult murderers have adult records, with an average career of six or more adult crimes, including four major felonies.”
If you ever fall afoul of one of these “choirboys,” it would be better for you to have a gun in spite of the chatterers at the Brady Center. As Gary Kleck reports in his book Point Blank, non-resisters to violent attack are two and a half times more likely to be injured than one resisting with a gun.
Don’t shoot real choirboys, but watch out for the guy with the rap sheet.
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FreeRepublic , LLC PO BOX 9771 FRESNO, CA 93794
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It is in the breaking news sidebar! |
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Speaking just for myself, the statistic is 100%
The left supports revolving door justice and then wants to deprive the law-abiding the means to defend themselves against the preditors the turn loose on us.
Gotta love that qualifier, harpseal! $;-)
If you weren't crawling around people's houses in the middle of the night you wouldn't have to worry about such things!
Hehe. Seriously did you expect Larry to look or act like the guy we talked to? I felt like I was hanging with Mr. Rogers (even looked like him) as opposed to the guy who heads one of the most powerful 2A lobbies in the nation.
Like the vast majority of us gunowners, if he was 1/100th the bloodthirsty fanatic that the left enjoys painting us as, he would have capped someone long ago!
Exactly!
When the dummy that tried to rob me at my office appeared in the doorway and realized that my .38 Colt revolver, with polished copper plated hollow points were gleaming at him from the cylinder and was aimed exactly at his forehead, while his puny little .380 was down at his side, I could watch his primitive mind compute that I would give him a third eye before he could raise up his hand to shoot me. He dropped his gun and ran.
After this experience there is no way, on this God's green Earth. that I will ever allow my country, or myself to become disarmed.
There are approximately 85,000,000 gun owners. If 1 in 100 gun owners committed a murder, you'd have approximately 850,000 murders per year. However, we don't have nearly that number of deaths of any kind caused by the firing of a firearm. No, there are roughly 30,000 gun-related deaths per year. Half are reputed to be from suicides - and you can't blame them on guns because Japan, which has virtually no guns, has a higher suicide rate than this country. Now we're down to 15,000. But let's remove from that figure the number of justifiable homicides - police shootings of bad guys or average citizens defending themselves. This is probably in the range of 3,000, so we're down to 12,000 actual murders.
But that's not where it ends. Let's withdraw from both sides of the equation those who have already been convicted of one or more violent felonies (or who are already wanted for one or more violent felonies, but haven't been caught yet), or by career criminals of one kind or another. If those people commit half of all murders (and I believe this to be a very conservative figure) then we're down to 6,000 murders committed by previously law-abiding gun owners. This represents 1 in 14,165 legitimate gun owners.
No, I can't prove any of these numbers-but I'm positive that they aren't off by orders of magnitude, like those of the anti-gunners.
I'd say that this demonstrates that gun owners are a rather low-risk class of people. But let's dig deeper. Who, exactly, obeys gun laws? Well, let's just say that even with 1st degree murder being a capital offense in most states, someone who is willing to murder another human being isn't deterred from such an act. How is a gun law, with a potential sentence of 5 years or so, supposed to deter such a person? Only the law-abiding have, do or will obey such laws. What do such laws accomplish? They punish those who are guilty of nothing, and who likely will never be guilty of any crime. The not only reduce the rights of the law-abiding, but they reduce the legitimate use of firearms to defend the lives of the innocent. By depriving the law-abiding of guns, criminals will be emboldened. I would predict that if there was a near-total gun ban imposed (and obeyed - that's a big "if"), murders by those with violent histories would soar by far more than the number of murders or accidents that would be stopped. The record of the UK and Australia confirms this. Not only would the quality of life decline substantially due to the rise in violent crime, but the very liberties that we so proudly cherish would be reduced, thereby further lowering the quality of life.
Congrats to you. First, for surviving such an encounter (though I'd bet that you've noticed that one's luck is enhanced in direct proportion to one's degree of advanced preparation). Second for recognizing that disarmament is the way to slavery, whether it be to the government or the criminal class. I wish more people would understand that.
I am fortunate not to have had such an experience, and I make every effort to keep my "lucky" streak alive by being street wise and avoiding higher crime areas. However, my family has its own experience with disarmament from which I learned a valuable lesson. Over 100 of my distant relatives (up to cousins and 2nd cousins of my grandparents) were murdered in the Shoah/Holocaust. I am sure that none of them had guns. I will never be disarmed, simply because I will never place myself so completely at the mercy of ANY government, no matter how benevolent it appears on the surface.
My wife's uncle was in Birkenau, one of the work camps attached to Auschwitz. He saw his father and brother murdered, and was himself shot and left for dead during the same incident. He survived the war, and now not only carries a weapon at all times, but owns a full auto Uzi. I promise you that HE will be disarmed only when dead. I have also learned much from him, and try to teach as many others as possible the same lesson.
The UK and Australia are perfect examples of how a disarmed civilian population becomes enslaved to the will or whim of criminals. The Shoah, the Turkish genocide of the Armenians during WW1, Soviet Russia, Communist China, Cambodia, Uganda and Rwanda are perfect examples of how a disarmed civilian population becomes enslaved to the will or whim of government. I'll not voluntarily live in either condition.
(On the question of Gold vs Cash , I'd rather have Ammunition.)
Gotta love that tagline!
P.S. See, Buck, we CAN agree on something!
The not only reduce the rights of the law-abiding...
should be
They not only reduce the rights of the law-abiding...
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