To: Brumar89 who wrote (989995 ) 12/23/2016 10:32:27 PM From: J_F_Shepard Read Replies (1) | Respond to 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...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.
