How Many Lives Are Saved by Guns — and Why Don’t Gun Controllers Care?

A few days ago a friend started complaining about gun ownership. I mentioned how many lives were saved, but he dismissed it.

I am primarily a pacifist in ideology, but would use a gun to save my life. I am sending this article to a friend and thought I should share it here, too. (Preaching to eh choir, I know.)


"As for determining how many lives are saved by guns, regulations bar the CDC from conducting original research of the defensive use of firearms. But after the Sandy Hook school massacre in 2012, President Barack Obama issued an executive order allowing the agency to review existing studies on causes of and ways to reduce gun violence. As to defensives uses of guns, the CDC report said, “Studies that directly assessed the effect of actual defensive uses of guns (i.e., incidents in which a gun was ‘used’ by the crime victim in the sense of attacking or threatening an offender) have found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies. … Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year, in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008.”

Criminologist and researcher Gary Kleck, using his own commissioned phone surveys and number extrapolation, estimates that Americans use guns for defensive purposes 1.2 million times each year — and that 1 in 6 Americans who have used guns defensively believe someone would have died but for their ability to resort to their defensive use of firearms. Twenty years ago economist John Lott, author of “More Guns, Less Crime,” and his research partner wrote: “We find that allowing citizens to carry concealed weapons deters violent crimes and it appears to produce no increase in accidental deaths. If those states which did not have right-to-carry concealed gun provisions had adopted them in 1992, approximately 1,570 murders; 4,177 rapes; and over 60,000 aggravated assaults would have been avoided yearly.”


[link to larryelder.com (secure)]

* Guns used 2.5 million times a year in self-defense. Law-abiding citizens use guns to defend themselves against criminals as many as 2.5 million times every year — or about 6,850 times a day. [1] This means that each year, firearms are used more than 80 times more often to protect the lives of honest citizens than to take lives. [2]

* Of the 2.5 million times citizens use their guns to defend themselves every year, the overwhelming majority merely brandish their gun or fire a warning shot to scare off their attackers. Less than 8% of the time, a citizen will kill or wound his/her attacker.[3]

[link to www.gunowners.org (secure)]