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underpants

(182,274 posts)
Fri Dec 21, 2012, 08:39 PM Dec 2012

Self-Defense Gun Use doesn't exist

1-3 Guns are not used millions of times each year in self-defense
4. Most purported self-defense gun uses are gun uses in escalating arguments and are both socially undesirable and illegal
5. Firearms are used far more often to intimidate than in self-defense.
6. Guns in the home are used more often to intimidate intimates than to thwart crime.

Using data from a national random-digit-dial telephone survey conducted under the direction of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, we investigated how and when guns are used in the home. We found that guns in the home are used more often to frighten intimates than to thwart crime; other weapons are far more commonly used against intruders than are guns.

7. Adolescents are far more likely to be threatened with a gun than to use one in self-defense.

8. Criminals who are shot are typically the victims of crime

Using data from a survey of detainees in a Washington D.C. jail, we worked with a prison physician to investigate the circumstances of gunshot wounds to these criminals.
We found that one in four of these detainees had been wounded, in events that appear unrelated to their incarceration. Most were shot when they were victims of robberies, assaults and crossfires. Virtually none report being wounded by a "law-abiding citizen."

9-10. Few criminals are shot by decent law abiding citizens

Using data from surveys of detainees in six jails from around the nation, we worked with a prison physician to determine whether criminals seek hospital medical care when they are shot. Criminals almost always go to the hospital when they are shot. To believe fully the claims of millions of self-defense gun uses each year would mean believing that decent law-abiding citizens shot hundreds of thousands of criminals. But the data from emergency departments belie this claim, unless hundreds of thousands of wounded criminals are afraid to seek medical care. But virtually all criminals who have been shot went to the hospital, and can describe in detail what happened there.

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/research/hicrc/firearms-research/gun-threats-and-self-defense-gun-use/index.html

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a geek named Bob

(2,715 posts)
1. criminals almost always go to the hospital???
Fri Dec 21, 2012, 08:43 PM
Dec 2012

and then the next part... can describe in detail what happened...

"when breaking into his house, he shot me" would be admitting to a crime.

Your study is shaky.

 

banned from Kos

(4,017 posts)
2. Ridiculous. Guns may create more victims than they save.
Fri Dec 21, 2012, 08:44 PM
Dec 2012

But to say successful self-defense is non-existent is absurd.

Honeycombe8

(37,648 posts)
3. Yes, guns are used for self defense.
Fri Dec 21, 2012, 08:50 PM
Dec 2012

I have a gun. I keep it for self defense IN CASE I need it. In fact, I have had to pull it on someone attempting a break-in (I pointed it at him thru the window). It kept him from continuing to attempt to break in. He ran like his pants were on fire and jumped an eight foot iron fence, as well.

If you show a gun to a criminal who is trying to commit a crime on you, you may not have to use it. You may have to, but maybe not. That was the case with me.

The fact that people use guns for dastardly deeds (or that people use knives or anything else for dastardly deeds) is no reason to ban them totally.

Now, assault weapons, however that's defined, is a horse of another color. They are not used for self defense, or needed for self defense. Neither are high count magazines and clips.

rustydog

(9,186 posts)
4. I agree. I think the worst part is the false sense of security people have
Fri Dec 21, 2012, 08:54 PM
Dec 2012

when they are armed. The facts are you are more likely to kill a loved one when you have a gun in the house.

The thought that because you now have a deadly weapon within reach (I hope it is actually locked up away from children) that you will win any confrontation is a fools wish.

The Magistrate

(95,237 posts)
5. True Enough, Sir, When One Rounds Down....
Fri Dec 21, 2012, 08:55 PM
Dec 2012

It is an over-statement to say it never happens, but it is hugely less common than 'Team NRA' likes to claim and pretend.

It is also true that a great proportion of claimed instances of 'self defense with a gun' boil down to someone simply displaying a gun when they 'feel threatened', upon which someone who saw the gun departs the scene. You have first the layer of total fiction, of a person simply making up the story, and then you have the further layer of whether the person assessed the situation correctly, and frightened off a criminal, or assessed the situation poorly, and simply menaced someone who simply had the misfortune to be near an armed paranoiac.

soryang

(3,299 posts)
6. The logic in 8,9, and 10 escapes me
Fri Dec 21, 2012, 09:26 PM
Dec 2012

one does not have to fire a gun to use it in self defense. in fact prior studies show that only one out of fifteen uses of a firearm in self defense involves discharge of the weapon.

ProgressiveProfessor

(22,144 posts)
8. This is all based on a phone survey
Fri Dec 21, 2012, 09:32 PM
Dec 2012

If you want to build a case on the same stuff that Gallop did, feel free. Don't mind the rest of us guffawing in the corner.

The one unaccounted metric is Defensive Gun Use. Both sides make their claims, including this so called study. Both spin like mad. The data is not collected nor is all of it collectable. Claims to the contrary by either side are lies...sort of like this study.

My story is that many years back my late wife shot and killed a home invader who was threatening to do the same to me. It was listed as a gun homicide, not self defense, though she was cleared.


underpants

(182,274 posts)
10. Yes Professor that is correct because we are not allowed the data to evaluate
Fri Dec 21, 2012, 09:43 PM
Dec 2012

This is the link to my own thread (full disclosure) from which this thread was posted
http://www.democraticunderground.com/101651090

The point, in this link, is that we don't have the data to evaluate.

http://harvardmagazine.com/2004/09/death-by-the-barrel.html
One of Hemenway’s main goals is to help create a society in which it is harder to make fatal blunders. He compares it to cutting down on speeding autos. "You can arrest speeders, but you can also put speed bumps or chicanes [curved, alternating-side curb extensions] into residential areas where children play….Just as…you can revoke the license of bad doctors, but also build [a medical] environment in which it’s harder to make an error, and the mistakes made are not serious or fatal."

Yet even if such interventions became public policy, there would be no way to evaluate their impact without meaningful data. Consider the 1994 law that bans assault weapons, which is due to expire this year. "We don’t know if homicides have gone up, down, or stayed the same as a result of this law," Hemenway says. "Or take unintentional gun deaths, of which there are about two a day. We don’t know if they tend to occur indoors or outdoors, whether the victim is the shooter or another person, whether they involve long guns or handguns, if they occur in the city or country, or if patterns have changed over time."

This ignorance about gun deaths stands in sharp contrast to the wealth of useful data available on motor-vehicle fatalities, for which more than 100 pieces of information per death are collected consistently in every state. Shortly after its creation in 1966, the predecessor of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration began to record information like the make, model, and year of the car, speed limit and speed of car, where people were sitting, use of seatbelts and more recently airbags, weather conditions—these data and many more are available to researchers on the Web. Consequently, Hemenway says, "We know what works. We know that speed kills, so if you raise speed limits, expect to see more highway deaths. Motorcycle helmets work; seat belts work. Car inspections and driver education have no effect. Right-on-red laws mean more pedestrians hit by cars."

ProgressiveProfessor

(22,144 posts)
12. The DOJ does not track or collect them nor would some of them make the stats anyway
Fri Dec 21, 2012, 09:53 PM
Dec 2012

Hemenway is a bit of a zealot on this.

 

slackmaster

(60,567 posts)
11. I used a knife in self-defense once. I didn't have to cut anyone.
Fri Dec 21, 2012, 09:44 PM
Dec 2012

If I had been armed with a gun, that would have worked just as well. And nobody would have been shot.

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