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Gun nuts claim 2.5 million times a year a gun owner will legally use his or her gun to stop a crime. That's over 6800 times a day. Only one video of this happening? And, it was a video from summer of 2012. News reports sometimes say the man was 63. Others 71. I don't think he age matters. I don't get robbing an internet cafe. How many laptops can two guys carry? Were they going to steal earrings, watches, and wedding bands? Two very dumb robbers. I can imagine the conversation.
"Let's rob a bank!"
Naw, that's been done. 9 out of 10 bank robbers are never caught. We need something ... risker. Fresher. Internet cafe! We'll be on video from all the webcams and security cameras. Instant street cred.
"So we run in and say ... Put all the money in the bag?"
No way. We frisk each person and take their stuff. Plus all the laptops we can carry!
"Alright. Just for kicks let's wear masks!"
Putting aside the stupidity of the bungling robbers, how many YouTube videos show truly defensive use of a gun? Not as many as terrorist attacks caught on camera. Not as many as train or plane crashes. Not as many as police brutality.
But, if we believe gun nuts, guns are used 2.5 million times a year for self defense. Huh?
Gun Clock
"At least 12 national and 3 state-wide surveys have asked probability samples of the general adult population about defensive gun use. The surveys differ in many important respects. The two most sophisticated national surveys are the National Self-Defense Survey done by Marc Gertz and myself in 1995 and a smaller scale survey done by the Police Foundation in 1996.
"The National Self-Defense Survey indicated that there were 2.5 million incidents of defensive gun use per year in the U.S. during the 1988-1993 period. This is probably a conservative estimate."
If guns were used legally to stop a crime, then the gun owner felt killing was the only option left to save a life. So for the gun nuts to be right, 2.5 million murders were stopped last year. Any other use of a gun was a crime like assault or murder.
There were 16,000 murders in the US. So 94% of murders were legally stopped by average citizens with a gun. And we have no police reports to back up this claim.
And how many videos?
