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Comment by edoo | Hacker News Reader

Weapons are just tools. The CDC did a study that showed guns are used 360% more often to protect than they are used by criminals. I would be proud of making a military weapon used to actually defend our country. The problem is our military isn't used defensively.

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This is actually what the study you are referencing said:

"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"

Page 15 of https://www.monticellocollege.org/sites/default/files/blog/G...

I'm really trying to find where I saw 360%, it has been a while, I might have to update if I find it. The 2001 Kleck study was 4 years newer and gave the range 166% to 1000%. And it says in the context of 300k firearm crimes in 2008 so I'm not sure how that works and whether an adjustment gets made for a reduced 200k firearm crimes in 2017.

So a woman in a car with a gun in her glovebox sees a group of young boisterous men approaching her. She gets the gun out of the glove box and brandishes it at them. They go away. Was this a "defensive gun use"? She will certainly report it as a defensive gun use. But we don't really know what those guys were doing.

The CDC doesn’t study gun violence anymore as that has been prevented by the Dickey Amendment, championed by the NRA. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dickey_Amendment

And yet the defensive gun use survey was conducted during the Obama administration.

Obama commissioned it. The report is linked below and cites CDC.

I’m assuming you’re American then. I don’t think it’s the offensive vs defensive nature of your army. I think it’s the arming smaller groups and letting them descend into chaos that is the problem. Arming a group to fight another group that they also armed while occasionally intervening. It’s like modern day cockfighting at a higher level. Except when one group loses the guns and weapons remain for next batch of fighters.

Their intentions are to help end the conflict but they fail to remove the weapons from the society afterwards. I realize this is implying the next batch carry the same views as the previous but I don’t think it’s a stretch to say your parents influence your outcome.

Well said. Those efficient killing tools patriotic people like GP want to invent end up in the hands of Taliban or Colombian drug lords or on both sides of a civil war between African warlords making the lives of ordinary civilians in such places incomparably worse. A few will also end up on the streets in America or in the hands of mass shooters, though this is more tightly controlled and less of a problem.

So, you’re saying that about 1 out of every 5 times a gun is used, it is used for a criminal act? And... you think that’s a good statistic?

I’d also question how the determined how often criminals use guns.

Out of every time one is used against a person. That is a huge distinction. Guns are used tremendously beyond that.

That's fair. Still, I suspect the use cases are very different. People who use guns for hunting and defense against large animals don't need concealed carry permits, nor do they need to carry their guns in the city. People who use guns for sport don't need their guns anywhere except at the firing range.

They're often the same guns, though.

I hunt with the AR-15 that I have set up for home defense, and I shoot competitively with the pistols I carry for personal defense on a daily basis.

Be careful with that depending how you do it. It is highly recommended to not modify your carry gun in any way. A trigger job will be spun by a prosecutor as blood lust.

Mas Ayoob is of that opinion, but I’m not. I’m aware of exactly one example of that happening.

To use to protect you need an agression.

Or is the stat consider mere display a use case ? In that cas it should include display for intimidation. The stat feels off.

The CDC is non exactly an unbiased organization. They ultimately report to the president, and there has not been a president in recent history who did not push for a fat 'defense budget'. Got a link to this study you are referring to?

https://www.nap.edu/catalog/18319/priorities-for-research-to...

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