Article by Forbes - Disarming the Myths Promoted By the Gun Control Lobby

Patricularly interesting stat...

Newsweek has reported that law-abiding American citizens using guns in self-defense during 2003 shot and killed two and one-half times as many criminals as police did, and with fewer than one-fifth as many incidents as police where an innocent person [was] mistakenly identified as a criminal (2% versus 11%).
 
A National Crime Victimization Study (NCVS) which asked victims if they had used a gun in self-defense found that about 108,000 each year had done so. A big problem with the NCVS line of survey reasoning, however, is that it only includes those uses where a citizen kills a criminal, not when one is only wounded, is held by the intended victim until police arrive, or when brandishing a gun caused a criminal to flee.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding this, but is that saying that this study found that 108,000 people per year had shot and killed a would be attacker? If so, despite the rest of the article being fair and accurate, it loses all credibility. There aren't 108,000 firearm related deaths per year, let alone justified self defense.
 
Maybe I'm misunderstanding this, but is that saying that this study found that 108,000 people per year had shot and killed a would be attacker? If so, despite the rest of the article being fair and accurate, it loses all credibility. There aren't 108,000 firearm related deaths per year, let alone justified self defense.

You're misreading it, though the sentence could be phrased better.

is that it only includes those uses where a citizen kills a criminal, not when one is only wounded, is held by the intended victim until police arrive, or when brandishing a gun caused a criminal to flee.
 
Maybe I'm misunderstanding this, but is that saying that this study found that 108,000 people per year had shot and killed a would be attacker? If so, despite the rest of the article being fair and accurate, it loses all credibility. There aren't 108,000 firearm related deaths per year, let alone justified self defense.

That's a good point, I didn't think about that. I'm guessing the survey is wrong.
 
You're misreading it, though the sentence could be phrased better.

That's a very strange way to break up an sentence, and to conduct a survey. So if you shoot and wound the criminal it doesn't count, but if you kill, detain, or scare away the criminal it does count? I'm even more confused than before.
 
Maybe I'm misunderstanding this, but is that saying that this study found that 108,000 people per year had shot and killed a would be attacker? If so, despite the rest of the article being fair and accurate, it loses all credibility. There aren't 108,000 firearm related deaths per year, let alone justified self defense.

That assumes that shooting and killing someone is the only definition of using a firearm in self defense. I would be more inclined to also include shooting and missing/wounding as well as brandishing as actions definable as using in self defense.
 
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