Guns Save Innocent Lives, The Numbers Back it Up
If we are going to talk about the facts when it comes to guns, then we need to ignore the sensational news media headlines, and instead look at the facts, and look at the numbers.
John Lott, Jr. says there are far more defensive uses of guns compared to murders, but here is why you rarely hear about them.
Lott: So far this year, I looked at five- the top five largest newspapers. Between all five of them, they had a combined total of 10 stories on defensive gun uses. At the same time, they had 2,764 stories of people being killed or wounded in crimes involving guns....if you only hear about bad things that happened with guns, and never hear about any of the benefits, it has a real impact on people's perceptions. But you know, there's a lot of academic research and survey evidence from the Department of Justice that indicates that people actually use guns about five times more frequently to stop crime than they use them to commit crime, but few people would would have any clue about that, just by carefully following the news.
Full audio with John Lott, Jr. and Aaron Flint:
In a recent column posted at Real Clear Investigations, Lott says there are over 1,000 examples in LOCAL news reports in the past year where guns were used to STOP a mass shooting or a crime. These stories don't get a lot of attention in the national news. And yet, these stories are only a fraction of the actual defensive gun cases happening every year.
Lott: The National Crime victimization survey claims that there's about 100,000 defensive gun uses a year, there are other surveys that on average, show about 2 million defensive gun uses.
Click here for his full column.
How Many in America: From Guns to Ghost Towns