“Gun Use In Self Defense?”

Interesting numbers from extranosalley.com

Someone stopped by searching for “gun use in self defense.”

They did not find it where they were sent, because firing a gun in self defense is not the same thing as crimes prevented by a gun. Since most crimes prevented by the presence or the possible presence of a gun are only known to the perpetrator, the place to start is with criminals. Who are hard to pin down unless they are already in prison.

From the standpoint of an inmate being surveyed on how often he, or sometimes she, committed a crime, how they selected victims and so on, the possible presence of a gun will almost always send them looking for safer prey. The car, is that an NRA sticker on the glass? Hunt club membership? The list for criminals is long, somewhat involved, but from the inmates standpoint, the mere presence of a gun presents enough danger to cause criminals to select another victim up to ten million times a year.

Where possible, criminals try to determine whether a homeowner will make an armed response to a disturbance. Rattle the doors, start the dog barking, and fade into the darkness. If the homeowner starts poking around with something that could be a gun – scratch one possible target off the list.

Of course, criminals are human and make mistakes. A half million times a year a criminal encounters an armed “victim.” The usual result is pretty much an “Excuse me, Mac, you know the way to Albuquerque?” That is, the perp makes some excuse and does the “getaway quickstep.”

From media reports, about five percent of the time, the perp lays down and plays nice until the guys with the handcuffs come to take the perp off the citizens hands.

But about one time if five, more or less 100,000 times a year, a citizen will pull the trigger on a criminal plying their trade.

Most humans have a strong aversion to harming another human, so approximately 90 percent of those shots miss. They are, knowingly or not, “warning shots.” And, given the idiocies of the law, it’s best to classify such shots as misses, because warning shots are illegal in many places.

Each year, approximately 10,000 perps are wounded seriously enough to require more than a bandaid. Approximately 1,400 of those die.

Violent Crime Rates Crashed As Gun Sales Boomed!

Now, the studies vary pretty widely in their results. Not because of any fault of the studies but because prison populations vary widely. As you would expect from a system whose prison descriptions run from “Country Club Acres” to “An Hour of Sunshine a Week.”

From the studies somewhere between 85,000 and 130,000 criminals are shot at each year as they pursue their trade.

“Bullet burns” and graze wounds aside, bullets strike home in 7,500 to 12,000 would be perpetrators.

Between 1,100 and 1,800 of the perps do not survive the experience. And the results of all of this – can be seen in the Bureau of Justice Statistics graphic on the right, which shows a 75% decline in violent crime since 1993. (Click on the graphic for a clearer view)

Now, why do the numbers I just quoted different from the numbers other studies have found? Look at that BJS chart again. It should be obvious that a study relying on data from the 1980′s, when comparatively few crimes were prevented by the presence of a gun, will find far fewer prevented crimes.

Stranger

Source extranosally.com