Posted by
netfotoj on Thursday, July 10, 2008 6:22:41 PM
Some wag said there’s lies, d--- lies and then there’s
statistics. But some statistics are true, like these you never hear gun-control
idiots quote.
Larry Elder at Townhall.com quotes these stats in Why
Do We "Keep and Bear Arms"? Part 2
Criminologist
and researcher Gary Kleck, using his own commissioned phone surveys and number
extrapolation, estimates that 2.5 million Americans use guns for defensive
purposes each year. One in six of that number, or 400,000, believe someone
would have been dead but for their ability to resort to their defensive use of
firearms. Kleck points out that if only one-tenth of the people are right about
saving a life, the number of people saved annually by guns would still be
40,000.
The Department
of Justice's own National Institute of Justice study entitled "Guns in America:
National Survey on Private Ownership and Use of Firearms" estimates that
1.5 million Americans use guns for defensive purposes every year. Although the
government's figure estimates a million fewer people defensively using guns,
the NIJ calls their figure "directly comparable" to Kleck's, noting,
"It is statistically plausible that the difference is due to sampling
error." Furthermore, the NIJ reports that half of their respondents who
said they used guns defensively also admitted having done so multiple times a
year -- making the number of estimated uses of self-defense with a gun 4.7
million times annually.
UCLA
Professor Emeritus James Q. Wilson, a respected expert on crime, police
practices and guns, says: "We know from Census Bureau surveys that
something beyond 100,000 uses of guns for self-defense occur every year. We
know from smaller surveys of a commercial nature that the number may be as high
as 2 1/2 or 3 million. We don't know what the right number is, but whatever the
right number is, it's not a trivial number."