LogFAQs > #898439719

Selenara posted...

Every year, there is one to two million defensive gun uses that prevent law-abiding people from being robbed, seriously injured, or killed. Making handguns harder to obtain punishes these people, not potential mass shooters or criminals with nefarious purposes.

This is such an obvious lie. First of all, we know that only a few hundred justifiable homicides by firearm from civilian use occur each year (the number hovers around the 275 range each year; the last year statistics are available for was 2015, where we saw 328, which was high). Second, we don't keep statistics on how many crimes are prevented by firearm because that's impossible. You could never know such a thing. Third, we can extrapolate, so let's do that. Let's assume a rather liberal estimate and say that guns prevented a crime but without the criminal being killed in five times as many instances. That would make the rate of crimes prevented by guns around the 1250-1500 range each year. And that's guessing high.

Meanwhile, more than 30k people die each year by firearms. To be fair, two thirds of these deaths are suicides (we'll get to that in a bit). That still means that rate of murder by firearm is about 36 times higher than the rate of civilian justifiable homicide by firearm. Rates of crimes involving firearms are generally over 450k each year, so that means that guns are involved in about 300 crimes for every one crime they prevent, and again that's guessing high on the prevention.

We also see high rates of suicide by firearm. We know from past studies and laws that suicide is almost always a momentary decision. Simply making it harder to kill yourself dramatically lowers your risk of killing yourself. Lowering rates of gun ownership thus actually lowers rates of suicide. People don't just find another method, they don't do it. This is similar to how putting fencing on bridges lowers suicide rates. People don't bother finding another way.

Point of fact: unregulated, widespread gun ownership makes a society far less safe. I'm all for ownership of firearms. I like shooting, personally. But we need universal background checks and registration for all guns.