I always love the phony claim of #4.....it first started with Prof Gary Kleck from U of Fla......about 30 years ago....he counted people getting their guns when they heard a racoon rattle their garbage can lids...
Info below comes from: latimes.com
The center also dives into the thorny thicket of how often the presence of a gun stops a crime — either violent or against property, such as a burglary — from happening. The gun lobby trots out an annual figure of 2.5 million such instances. But an analysis of five years’ worth of stats collected by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey puts the number much, much lower — about 67,740 times a year.
It’s also useful, as the Violence Policy Center does, to dig into the relationships among the attackers and those who kill in self-defense. Over the five-year span ending in 2012, more than half — 56% — of the justifiable homicides involved strangers, and in 11% of the cases, the relationship was not reported. The rest were acquaintances (18.7%) such as neighbors and coworkers, and then a mishmash of relatives and personal relationships.
Conversely, of the 2012 criminal firearm homicides in which a relationship was reported, three out of four victims knew their killers, and more than a third were family members or "intimate acquaintances" — such as spouses, ex-spouses or others involved in a romantic relationship.
And those suicides? About half of all suicides are committed with guns, and seven in 10 by men, who also account for 74% of gun owners in the country.
Oddly, given these combined statistics, nearly half of gun owners say they keep weapons because it makes them feel safer, a proportion that has increased dramatically since 1999 even though violent crime has been in a steady decline.
So what conclusions can we draw from this? The notion that a good guy with a gun will stop a bad guy with a gun is a romanticized vision of the nature of violent crime. And that the sea of guns in which we live causes exponentially more danger and harm than good. It's long past time to start emphasizing the "well-regulated" phrase in the 2nd Amendment.
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