[Bert Hyman]

(dave weil) wrote in
:

He also trotted out one of those occasions where vigilanties
prevented crime.

Vigilantes? Self-defense is now vigilantism?

Well, with 12,000 plus gun-related murders a year, and something
like 30,000 gun deaths of all kinds a year, I'm not sure if it
really matters that a handful of lives have been saved by some
amateurs lucky enough not to have killed bystanders or themselves.

Handful?

"The most technically sound estimates presented in Table 2
are those based on the shorter one-year recall period that
rely on Rs' firsthand accounts of their own experiences
(person-based estimates). These estimates appear in the first
two columns. They indicate that each year in the U.S. there
are about 2.2 to 2.5 million DGUs [Defensive Gun Use] of all
types by civilians against humans, with about 1.5 to 1.9
million of the incidents involving use of handguns."

"ARMED RESISTANCE TO CRIME: THE PREVALENCE AND NATURE OF
SELF-DEFENSE WITH A GUN" Kleck & Gertz, Journal of Criminal Law and
Criminology (Northwestern) Guns and Violence Symposium, vol. 86, no.
1, 1995: 150.

"THE ILLEGITIMACY OF ONE-SIDED SPECULATION: GETTING THE DEFENSIVE GUN
USE ESTIMATE DOWN" Kleck & Gertz, Journal of Criminal Law and
Criminology (Northwestern) 87 (1997): 1446.

--
Bert Hyman | St. Paul, MN |