Ask Lemmy

274 justifiable homicides involving a private citizen using a firearm

Ok, and how many defensive uses of a firearm occurred that year where the defender did not kill the attacker? Cases where the attacker was merely injured, or the defender missed, or the attacker ran off at the sight of the firearm? Why are those entirely omitted, does it only count as self defense if the attacker dies, not if one successfully stops the attack without a justifiable homicide?

And while we're at it, how many justifiable homicides occurred that year with your defensive weapon of choice, The Hammer? If the metric used to determine a weapon's viability for defense is simply justifiable homicides/yr, blind bet: it's less than 274.

Btw

only 1.1 percent of victims of attempted or completed violent crimes used a firearm,

While around 45% of people own a gun, only 21% of people carry a gun ever, and even less carry everywhere always, and this figure doesn't take into account whether or not the victims had a gun on them with which to defend themselves. This stat is entirely meaningless without controling for that.

and only 0.3 percent of victims of attempted or completed property crimes used a firearm.

Well that's illegal unless you're in Texas at night, so, unless that's all they're counting this makes me further question the voracity of the study. You're telling me that 0.3 percent of people in the study successfully justifiably killed someone for something that is illegal to kill people for? That's not how this works lol.