Kirata
Posts: 15477
Joined: 2/11/2006 From: USA Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: freedomdwarf1 As for your Lott's book to support your logical argument.... 19 esteemed people/teams support the conclusions. 26 esteemed people/teams oppose those conclusions. I'll go with the majority, TYVM. In 2004, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences released its evaluation from a review of 253 journal articles, 99 books, 43 government publications, and some original empirical research. It failed to identify any gun control that had reduced violent crime, suicide, or gun accidents. The same conclusion was reached in 2003 by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control’s review of the extant studies... Comparison of "homicide and suicide mortality data for thirty-six nations (including the United States) for the period 1990-1995" to gun ownership levels showed "no significant (at the 5% level) association between gun ownership levels and the total homicide rate." Consistent with this is a later European study of data from 21 nations in which "no significant correlations [of gun ownership levels] with total suicide or homicide rates were found." Source: Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy Defensive use of guns by crime victims is a common occurrence, although the exact number remains disputed (Cook and Ludwig, 1996; Kleck, 2001a). Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million (Kleck, 2001a), in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008 (BJS, 2010). On the other hand, some scholars point to a radically lower estimate of only 108,000 annual defensive uses based on the National Crime Victimization Survey (Cook et al., 1997). The variation in these numbers remains a controversy in the field. The estimate of 3 million defensive uses per year is based on an extrapolation from a small number of responses taken from more than 19 national surveys. The former estimate of 108,000 is difficult to interpret because respondents were not asked specifically about defensive gun use. A different issue is whether defensive uses of guns, however numerous or rare they may be, are effective in preventing injury to the gun-wielding crime victim. Studies that directly assessed the effect of actual defensive uses of guns (i.e., incidents in which a gun was "used" by the crime victim in the sense of attacking or threatening an offender) have found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies (Kleck, 1988; Kleck and DeLone, 1993; Southwick, 2000; Tark and Kleck, 2004). Source: National Research Council K.
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