NCJ Number
127647
Date Published
1990
Length
19 pages
Annotation
Individuals remain responsible for their own personal safety, with police providing only an auxiliary general deterrent. The issue is whether those individuals should be free to choose gun ownership as a means of protecting individuals should be free to choose gun ownership as a means of protecting themselves, their homes, and their families.
Abstract
Anti-gun discussions should mention the major defect in judging how many defense uses there were on the basis of defensive killings alone. That excludes as much as 96 percent of all defensive gun uses which did not involve killing criminals, but only scaring them off or capturing them without death. This omission speciously minimizes the extent of civilians capture or rout upwards of 30 times more criminals than they kill. Exacerbating the minimization problem was the highly misleading way opponents of handgun ownership selected and presented pre-1980s lawful homicide data. On the basis of only anti-gun polls, it is now clear that handguns are used as or more often in repelling crimes annually as in committing them, approximately 645,000 defense uses annually versus about 580,000 criminal misuses. 69 notes