I personally don’t find it persuasive, just drawing logical parallels isn’t that impressive compared to actual research. But if you can’t understand the analogy, then you’re probably not mentally fit to have a gun anyway.
Guns don’t work like video game guns. You can shoot a person 10 times and inflict 10 fatal wounds, and they can still keep coming at you.
If you aim for the head, who is behind them? A bullet doesn’t just stop when it hits something.
What the chance you’ll miss? A bullet can go a long way if it doesn’t hit your target.
People take time to die. Other people can be behind your target. Guns don’t protect, they only kill.
As a gun owner, and someone who has studied many use of force situations, I know all of this.
However someone who takes 10 rounds and keeps coming is extremely rare. And that will generally only happen when none of those rounds hit critical areas.
Part of responsible gun ownership is understanding that you are responsible for every bullet you fire, and it will keep going until something stops it.
However I would challenge your position really with two core concepts:
The overwhelming majority, 90+%, of defensive gun uses end with no shots fired. The criminal sees the gun and runs away. In those situations, the gun did not kill, it protected.
Look up the Wikipedia page on defensive gun uses. Depending on which researcher you go with, there are somewhere between 60,000 and several million defensive gun incidents each year. If what you are saying is true, even if you assume that 90% of them have no shots fired, there would still be tens of hundreds of thousands at minimum incidents where the gun killed rather than protected. Because it didn’t stop the assailant, because an innocent bystander was hit, etc. Why is this not major news? Why are the anti-gun lobbyists not showing up to Congress with a stack full of news articles?
I would argue that is simply because it does not happen the way you say.
Look up the stats on defensive gun uses. Just Google it.
The vast majority (90+%) end with no shots fired- the criminal sees the gun and runs away.
Because it’s regularly over reported.
People call the police and claim they saw/heard a thing, then grabbed a gun. Police arrive to investigate and it is - predictably - nothing. Resident self-reports that they must have scared the ephemeral assailant of. Cops dutifully write it up without further investigation.
Gun-as-security-blanket is registered as successful defensive use.
Determining the exact count is difficult. If you look at the wikipedia page on defensive gun use, you see that since it’s not centrally tracked and many go unreported, the only way to get any sort of number is with phone surveys and statistical analysis. That leaves a lot of opening to interpretation of the data.
Thus you have anti-gun researchers like Hemenway who put it at ~60,000 incidents/year and pro-gun researchers like Lott who put it at 2-4 million incidents/year. (I say anti/pro gun because Hemenway’s other writings advocate for gun control, while Lott’s other writings advocate against gun control). Obviously the number is somewhere in the middle.
But the firearm homicide rate (excluding suicides) is around 10k-15k/year, which means even if you only go with worst case data it means there’s 4x more DGUs as there are firearm homicides.
I’ll give you that’s a slightly apples to oranges comparison, as many firearm assaults don’t end in death.
But the real issue IMHO, which is unfortunately not tracked AFAIK, is how many gun crimes are committed with legal guns. IE, legally purchased/owned guns by a non-prohibited gun owner. That IMHO is some data that would really help settle the issue.
I’d argue that the lion’s share of those 10-15k homicides per year are committed with illegal guns / prohibited owners, they are gang and drug related. The problem is that’s often hard to prove and it doesn’t show up in data sets. For example, you have incidents in sites like ‘mass shooting tracker’ like:
‘On friday at 11pm, victim1 and victim2 were leaving a house party in the 12,000 block of Nowhere St. Two unknown males opened fire from a moving vehicle. Victim1 and victim2 were wounded, along with bystander1 and bystander2 who were injured non-critically.’
Now that’s a ‘mass shooting’ because 4 people got shot. Read between the lines and it’s ‘gangland drive-by’. But you can’t prove that as the victims won’t admit to being in a gang and the perps weren’t caught. But you can bet those guns were illegal and the car was stolen.
If you look at the wikipedia page on defensive gun use, you see that since it’s not centrally tracked and many go unreported
The definition of “defensive use” ranges from “discharged weapon at assailant” to “announced possession of weapon at scary noise”. So much of it relies on taking police reports at face value, no questions asked.
But the real issue IMHO, which is unfortunately not tracked AFAIK, is how many gun crimes are committed with legal guns. IE, legally purchased/owned guns by a non-prohibited gun owner. That IMHO is some data that would really help settle the issue.
I haven’t seen anything to suggest legality of ownership translates to defensiveness of use.
And none of this addresses the central problem of gun ownership - suicide. You are the person most likely to be killed by your own gun.
I’ve never set my house on fire, but I still feel better having a fire extinguisher.
I don’t see how this applies to guns.
If your house is on fire, you would want a fire extinguisher, not another flamethrower.
Americans like to shoot out the flames.
Doesn’t look too effective
don’t forget the uses in the kitchen.
But… They said to fight fire with fire!
I personally don’t find it persuasive, just drawing logical parallels isn’t that impressive compared to actual research. But if you can’t understand the analogy, then you’re probably not mentally fit to have a gun anyway.
If you have an emergency you want the tool that protects against that emergency.
If there’s a fire you want a tool to put the fire out. That could be a bucket, but a fire extinguisher works better.
If you are threatened with a violent person who wants to do you harm, can you name a more effective tool than a gun?
Guns don’t work like video game guns. You can shoot a person 10 times and inflict 10 fatal wounds, and they can still keep coming at you.
If you aim for the head, who is behind them? A bullet doesn’t just stop when it hits something.
What the chance you’ll miss? A bullet can go a long way if it doesn’t hit your target.
People take time to die. Other people can be behind your target. Guns don’t protect, they only kill.
As a gun owner, and someone who has studied many use of force situations, I know all of this.
However someone who takes 10 rounds and keeps coming is extremely rare. And that will generally only happen when none of those rounds hit critical areas.
Part of responsible gun ownership is understanding that you are responsible for every bullet you fire, and it will keep going until something stops it.
However I would challenge your position really with two core concepts:
The overwhelming majority, 90+%, of defensive gun uses end with no shots fired. The criminal sees the gun and runs away. In those situations, the gun did not kill, it protected.
Look up the Wikipedia page on defensive gun uses. Depending on which researcher you go with, there are somewhere between 60,000 and several million defensive gun incidents each year. If what you are saying is true, even if you assume that 90% of them have no shots fired, there would still be tens of hundreds of thousands at minimum incidents where the gun killed rather than protected. Because it didn’t stop the assailant, because an innocent bystander was hit, etc. Why is this not major news? Why are the anti-gun lobbyists not showing up to Congress with a stack full of news articles?
I would argue that is simply because it does not happen the way you say.
The most likely person to shot you is yourself.
The second most likely person to shot you is a housemate.
The third most likely person to shot you is a loved one.
Look up the stats on defensive gun uses. Just Google it.
The vast majority (90+%) end with no shots fired- the criminal sees the gun and runs away.
If someone threatens me and my family I want a better option than ‘hope the violent criminal decides to let us live’.
Because it’s regularly over reported.
People call the police and claim they saw/heard a thing, then grabbed a gun. Police arrive to investigate and it is - predictably - nothing. Resident self-reports that they must have scared the ephemeral assailant of. Cops dutifully write it up without further investigation.
Gun-as-security-blanket is registered as successful defensive use.
Determining the exact count is difficult. If you look at the wikipedia page on defensive gun use, you see that since it’s not centrally tracked and many go unreported, the only way to get any sort of number is with phone surveys and statistical analysis. That leaves a lot of opening to interpretation of the data.
Thus you have anti-gun researchers like Hemenway who put it at ~60,000 incidents/year and pro-gun researchers like Lott who put it at 2-4 million incidents/year. (I say anti/pro gun because Hemenway’s other writings advocate for gun control, while Lott’s other writings advocate against gun control). Obviously the number is somewhere in the middle.
But the firearm homicide rate (excluding suicides) is around 10k-15k/year, which means even if you only go with worst case data it means there’s 4x more DGUs as there are firearm homicides.
I’ll give you that’s a slightly apples to oranges comparison, as many firearm assaults don’t end in death.
But the real issue IMHO, which is unfortunately not tracked AFAIK, is how many gun crimes are committed with legal guns. IE, legally purchased/owned guns by a non-prohibited gun owner. That IMHO is some data that would really help settle the issue.
I’d argue that the lion’s share of those 10-15k homicides per year are committed with illegal guns / prohibited owners, they are gang and drug related. The problem is that’s often hard to prove and it doesn’t show up in data sets. For example, you have incidents in sites like ‘mass shooting tracker’ like:
‘On friday at 11pm, victim1 and victim2 were leaving a house party in the 12,000 block of Nowhere St. Two unknown males opened fire from a moving vehicle. Victim1 and victim2 were wounded, along with bystander1 and bystander2 who were injured non-critically.’
Now that’s a ‘mass shooting’ because 4 people got shot. Read between the lines and it’s ‘gangland drive-by’. But you can’t prove that as the victims won’t admit to being in a gang and the perps weren’t caught. But you can bet those guns were illegal and the car was stolen.
The definition of “defensive use” ranges from “discharged weapon at assailant” to “announced possession of weapon at scary noise”. So much of it relies on taking police reports at face value, no questions asked.
I haven’t seen anything to suggest legality of ownership translates to defensiveness of use.
And none of this addresses the central problem of gun ownership - suicide. You are the person most likely to be killed by your own gun.