Guns as a deterent

[krispos42]

23. Well, you have to figure that in high-crime areas

which tend to be in big cities with strict gun-control laws and little if any CCW permits, a lot of them aren't reported.

For example, Adam lives in a crime-ridden neighborhood and carries a pistol with them when he goes out to work. He's not a career criminal and his job is legitimate, but he illegally carries a gun because he's afraid of crime. If he deploys the gun in self-defense (anything from a casual exposure of a holstered gun to drawing and aiming), he's not probably not going to call the cops because he doesn't want to be arrested. So when he uses the gun for self-defense, unless and until he has to actually shoot somebody, his uses will go unreported to the police.

Barry also lives in a crime-ridden neighborhood. He's a career criminal, fencing stolen merchandise and dealing drugs. He also routinely carries a pistol, both for intimidation purposes and for defensive ones. Focusing on the defensive here, Barry, like Adam, is not going to call the police if he (Barry) has to use the gun in self-defense. The self-defense might be different from avoiding muggers, as Barry is conducting business with other career criminals on a regular basis whereas Adam is just trying to dodge muggers and rapists and such. But it's still self-defense.


Then you have the case of people like Charlie, who is woken up by the proverbial "bump in the night". Charlie grabs a gun and a flashlight and goes poking around downstairs, trying to figure out if it was the cat, the house settling, or somebody trying to break into his home. He doesn't find anybody and goes back to sleep, but if somebody asked him if he ever used a gun in self-defense, he would say "yes".


So, given we have over about 100 million gun owners, and a year is 365 days long, I can see that in any given 24-hour period there are 5-6,000 times where a person grabbed a gun in anticipation of needing it.



The vast difference between "self-defense homicides" (400) and "reported defensive gun uses" (1,000,000 to 2,000,000) tells me that nearly every time a gun is grabbed for self-defense, it's a false alarm (nothing there after all), or the criminal flees at the sight of the gun.