Outside of the last twelve months, I know two friends who have had defensive uses of guns.strogg wrote: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.Flightmare wrote: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.strogg wrote: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.stroo wrote:Whether the number is 92000 or 2.5 million, that is a lot of uses of guns in self defence!!!
Its really not all that uncommon or unrealistic.
In 2016, there were 1.2 million "successful" violent crimes. If one includes non-violent crime (such as burglary), that number jumps to 1.2 million violent crimes plus 7.9 million property crimes. 9.1 million total crimes committed (in a county of 320 million people, that still pretty low).
If defensive gun uses only occur in 10% of violent crimes (assuming all DGUs are reported and logged as crimes) and only 10% of property crimes, with an additional 5% on potential crimes that were never actually reported to the police, we would get 1.3 million DGU's in today's numbers.
Considering crime has continued on a steady downward trend since 1996, its not too hard to image these DGU's would reverse back 20 years to the numbers he presents.
Believe it or not, gun crime and crime in general is on a steady decline- despite what the media tries to shove down your throat for ad revenue...
