When a lunatic or criminal misuses a gun in an isolated incident to harm people, gun control proponents tell us we need more gun control and we need it now. To make this point, they seize on one illegal gun use while ignoring hundreds–even hundreds of thousands–of defensive gun uses (DGUs) each year.
According to some surveys, gun control proponents may even be ignoring millions of DGUs each year.
Think about the way Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) pushed gun control after a firearm-related murder at LAX on and a shooting at a New Jersey mall took place in one week’s time: LAX on November 1st and Westfield Garden State Plaza Mall on November 4.
Said Reid, “‘Shooting of the week,’ is what we have now.” His solution? More gun control.
What Reid never mentions is that the minimum figure for DGUs is about 760,000 a year (see John R. Lott’s, More Guns, Less Crime). These figures are compiled from polls by the LA Times, Gallup, and Peter Hart Research Associates. And if you divide 760,000 by the 52 weeks of a year, it works out to about 14,615 DGUs a week–slightly more than 2,082 a day.
Here’s the kicker–according to some of the polls Lott compiled in his work, annual DGUs could top three million.
Lott adds: “Even if these estimates are wrong by a very large factor, they still suggest that defensive gun use is very common.”
The bottom line: Guns are lifesavers, and when criminals alone have guns then law-abiding citizens will have no way to defend or save their own lives.
Follow AWR Hawkins on Twitter @AWRHawkins