From: Michael S. Lorrey (retroman@turbont.net)
Date: Mon Sep 25 2000 - 08:30:53 MDT
Jason Joel Thompson wrote:
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Samantha Atkins" <samantha@objectent.com>
>
> > Statistically many crimes are stopped by an armed
> > would be victim or witness with no shot fired.
>
> Well, since you brought it up, what are the statistics?
Gary Kleck, a rather well respected crime researcher, conducted a study on this
and found an annual rate of 2.5 million Defensive Gun Uses per year. Even
anti-gunners admit that there are a minimum of 60,000 defensive gun uses (versus
9,000 innocent people killed by others with guns, out of a total 32,000 gun
deaths per year), derived from strictly defined criteria in the FBI database
(part of which includes not counting DGUs which were found to be illegal by
defective and onerous state laws and prosecutors). A study done of several dozen
major studies in this area came up with an average estimate of around 800,000
DGUs per year. While this is obviously a very broad range, given the
partisanship of this issue, its to be expected, although Kleck is considered by
most on both sides of the issue to be credible.
A purely economic study of gun crime vs. gun defense found that so long as
civilians kill 2,000 criminals a year with private guns defensively, there is a
break even on the economic impact. If civilians kill 3,000 criminals a year
defensively, there is somewhere between $1 billion and $30 billion net benefit
to the economy. This includes not only the fact that les prison space would need
to be built, but lower insurance rates, lower medical costs, less need for
police, less need for security systems, etc...
Prof. John Lott, in his book _More Guns, Less Crime_ found a significant impact
on crime when civilians are more freely allowed to carry concealed weapons,
while at the same time found almost no impact from the death penalty as it is
currently administered (he studied ALL FBI crime stats from 1979 to 1995, the
first and ONLY researcher to do so). The largest anti-gun study of concealed
weapon use consisted of only five cherry picked counties that happened to have
statistics which supported the anti-gun position on concealed carry. John Lott
mentioned this in his book. The author of that study declared Lott's own study
'flawed' after refusing to even read it.
Mike Lorrey
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