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I'm going to have to look into these statistics a little more. At this point, the 2.5 million may sound closer to point than the 92,000, although 92,000 is exactly what the survey for 1996 says. I guess a lot of my personal bias comes from where I grew up in the 90s. I've been fortunate enough to grow up in a suburban area where violent crime is rare. It's one of those places where having a gun for self defense really isn't all that necessary; there are better places to put your money, time, and effort. Local LEOs do an excellent job curtailing crime over there. It's not some crazy conspiracy cover-up like in Hot Fuzz either.

Flightmare wrote:

strogg wrote:

stroo wrote:Whether the number is 92000 or 2.5 million, that is a lot of uses of guns in self defence!!!

Agreed. 92000 sounds about right, and is still a huge number. That doesn't count the people who refused to answer and actually did have an encounter nor does it include people who've had multiple encounters. 2.5 million means that statistically, at least one person in this thread personally knows someone who's used a gun to confront someone else in self defense IN THE PAST YEAR. I highly doubt that's the case.

A buddy of mine confronted a person trying to break into the sliding glass door on his back porch last year. The would-be criminal turned tail and ran when he saw my buddy and his Ruger SR9. No shots were fired, but I would consider that to be a defensive use of a gun.

Fair enough. Time to eat crow on that one. I, on the other hand, have not personally known a single person who has had an experience like that in my entire lifetime.

stroo wrote:Whether the number is 92000 or 2.5 million, that is a lot of uses of guns in self defence!!!

Agreed. 92000 sounds about right, and is still a huge number. That doesn't count the people who refused to answer and actually did have an encounter nor does it include people who've had multiple encounters. 2.5 million means that statistically, at least one person in this thread personally knows someone who's used a gun to confront someone else in self defense IN THE PAST YEAR. I highly doubt that's the case.

I feel like I'm missing something here. I did what the author of the paper did. I went to the CDC website and downloaded the BRFSS survey and data for 1996. I took the ASCII dataset and looked at column 314 (the one that asks the DGU question). I counted all the 1 responses. I got 55 out of about 120000, which equates to about 92,000 DGUs (rounding up) in 1996 among the 200,000,000 adults. How does 92,000 translate to 2.5 million as stated in the article?