A response to a Washington Post piece doing to devoted duty of protecting the Bloomberg Brigade, regarding this piece.
But gun-rights supporters zeroed on in a few statements to make their case. One related to the defensive use of guns. The New American Magazine article noted that “Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year, in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008.”
So it would appear the “good use” of guns outweighs the “bad use.” That may be true, except the study says all of those statistics are in dispute—creating, in the study authors' eyes, a research imperative.
And?
The authors also say gun ownership might be good for defensive uses, but that benefit could be canceled out by the risk of suicide or homicide that comes with gun ownership.
Ridiculous. Were this the case we'd have millions of homicides a year from millions of gun owners. Good grief. They're not even trying.
As I said, which remains true and uncontested, firearms are used more for defense than illegally possessed to commit crimes. That's the point gun control activists are trying to attack, but as they can't overcome it, they want to skirt it and focus on the number of defensive uses per year.
