Free Republic

On 7 December 2018, at about 7:45 p.m., the owner of the Alibaba's convenience store in Syracuse, New York shot and wounded an armed robber. The robber ended up in the hospital. The story made the news. A local reporter for syracuse.com, Patrick Lohmann, investigated the story and wrote it up. While doing a followup, Lohmann discovered the store owner had shot another robbery suspect six weeks earlier.That story did *not* make the news. From syracuse.com: SYRACUSE, N.Y. — A tobacco shop owner who shot and badly injured a would-be robber Friday night at his North Side store also...

Gary Kleck, the award-winning criminologist who documented significant levels of defensive gun use (DGU) in American society, has uncovered research done by the CDC that strongly corroborates his findings.  Kleck and Gertz's seminal study was done in 1993, presented in 1994, and published in 1995. The CDC research was done in 1996, 1997, and 1998, but was never publicized.From ssrn.com: The BRFSS surveys are high-quality telephone surveys of enormous probability sample of U.S. adults, asking about a wide range of health-related topics. Those that addressed DGUasked more people about this topic than any other surveys conducted before or since....

An enormous number of defensive shootings are not included in the data about defensive gun use.  These are the shootings of animals, not in defense of people; those are often reported.  No, they are defensive shootings of animals in defense of other animals, and often crops or other property.  In defense of animals, the species most often shot are dogs. There are occasional cries of outrage when someone has to shoot a dog in order to save another animal.  They usually come from people who have no conception of reality outside their apartment or suburban home.  These people seem...

Crime victims used to be ignored by criminologists. Then, beginning slowly in the 1940s and more rapidly in the 1970s, interest in the victim's role in crime grew. Yet a tendency to treat the victim as either a passive target of another person's wrongdoing or as a virtual accomplice of the criminal limited this interest. The concept of the victim-precipitated homicide [1] highlighted the possibility that victims were not always blameless and passive targets, but that they sometimes initiated or contributed to the escalation of a violent interaction through their own actions, which they often claimed were defensive. Perhaps due...

“‘Leave these senior citizens alone,’ he said. ‘We ain’t playing. I’m serious. If they come knocking on my door, I got something for them.’” When barber Calvin Brown says he has something for them, he doesn’t mean the latest Roffler cut."