Monday, November 23, 2009

Guns Save Lives

NewsLeader.com posted a response to all the recent gun control talk generated by the Ft. Hood incident. Responding to a letter citing the terrible tragedies of Ft. Hood and Virginia Tech as examples crying out for gun control, the article reminds us of this.

...both of these massacres occurred in gun-free zones. So, thanks to progressive legislation, the murderers in both cases were assured that they would be gunning down unarmed individuals.

It goes on to list several quotes from the Iowa Carry site.

Even anti-gun Clinton researchers concede that guns are used 1.5 million times annually for self-defense.

Armed citizens shoot and kill at least twice as many criminals as police do every year (1,527 to 606).

Only 2 percent of civilian shootings involved an innocent person mistakenly identified as a criminal. The "error rate" for the police, however, was 11 percent, more than five times as high.

States which passed concealed-carry laws reduced their murder rate by 8.5 percent, rapes by 5 percent, aggravated assaults by 7 percent and robbery by 3 percent.

In 1982, Kennesaw, Ga., passed a law requiring at least one firearm in the house. The residential burglary rate subsequently dropped 89 percent in Kennesaw, compared to the modest 10.4 percent drop in Georgia as a whole.

What do you think about these claims? Is the fact that no footnotes or links were provided a big problem? People often complain about that in my writing. I don't mind it really, I think there's plenty here to talk about. What do you think?

One thing that comes to my mind is there are a lot of statistics here. Isn't it likely that other researchers have come up with different results, sometimes opposite results? Isn't that the nature of statistics in the gun control argument?

Combining the first two points, does it mean there are 1.5 million defensive incidents which result in only 1,500 shooting deaths? Is that due to the old idea that brandishing the weapon accounts for most of the 1.5 million? I have to say, it sounds a bit far-fetched to me, no matter how you put it.

What's your opinion? Please leave a comment.

1 comment:

  1. Well you could do some research and verify the data, but that could be mighty difficult for someone so immune to facts & logic.

    ReplyDelete