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I'm involved in a very civil ongoing discussion about guns with an anti-gun friend of mine.

One claim that they are making is that a gun is far more likely to be used in a domestic violence situation, then it is likely to be used in a self defense situation.

It's kind of a silly point if you ask me. i have plenty of data showing murder rates vs DGU for self defense.

But the claim is not that someone is being murdered in the domestic, but used in a non lethal manner.

I'm hoping someone with better research skills than me can link me to a resource disproving this.

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks.
 
I've seen some statistics showing that suicides via gun are higher than other forms of death via gun (whether self defense or homicide), but I don't think I've ever seen the data broken out in terms of a domestic-violence situation.

Peter
 
According to the rules of debate, as I learned them long ago in the dark ages...if they've made a claim, it's up to them to prove it, not up to you to disprove it. Once you have their source data, then you can pick it apart easily.

As for defensive use of firearms, there are multiple studies out there. John Lott has a book out about "More Guns, Less Crime" if I remember the title correctly...
 
Wouldn't it be great if all 'news' sources that provide opinions followed the rule of debate and provided the evidence for having these opinions. Heck, 90% of them yappers would have to find another source of money for nothing.

As to the question, is using the gun as a threat considered 'a non lethal manner', if so, you know there are no potential sources of data to support or deny that argument, however any argument made from such fluff is only a smokescreen.
 
***DISCLAIMER***
The opinion being stated is just for entertainment and should not be used by a sane and rational person
***DISCLAIMER***

To simply win this "debate" all you do is say I am the abused wife and you are the abusive husband. Without a gun, you will physically beat me to death. If I have a gun, you won't beat me, if you get shot so be it. Where as if you had the gun you would just end my suffering quicker than if you just slowly beat me to death. This should be done while passing a loaded gun between to the two of you.
 
It's probably more likely that if there is a gun in a house where the is a man who beats his wife,that it will be used for murder.

All statistics depend on who paid for the study.
And the other side likes to add lots of getto stats and police stats to their studies to "fluff" the fingings to their needs

Now as far as IN GENERAL, it probably more likely that the gun will be a safe queen or poke lots of holes in paper,than it is that it WILL EVER be pointed will "ill intent"
 
* Roughly 16,272 murders were committed in the United States during 2008. Of these, about 10,886 or 67% were committed with firearms.[11]



* A 1993 nationwide survey of 4,977 households found that over the previous five years, at least 0.5% of households had members who had used a gun for defense during a situation in which they thought someone "almost certainly would have been killed" if they "had not used a gun for protection." Applied to the U.S. population, this amounts to 162,000 such incidents per year. This figure excludes all "military service, police work, or work as a security guard."[12]



* Based on survey data from the U.S. Department of Justice, roughly 5,340,000 violent crimes were committed in the United States during 2008. These include simple/aggravated assaults, robberies, sexual assaults, rapes, and murders.[13] [14] [15] Of these, about 436,000 or 8% were committed by offenders visibly armed with a gun.[16]



* Based on survey data from a 2000 study published in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology,[17] U.S. civilians use guns to defend themselves and others from crime at least 989,883 times per year.[18]



* A 1993 nationwide survey of 4,977 households found that over the previous five years, at least 3.5% of households had members who had used a gun "for self-protection or for the protection of property at home, work, or elsewhere." Applied to the U.S. population, this amounts to 1,029,615 such incidents per year. This figure excludes all "military service, police work, or work as a security guard."[19]



* A 1994 survey conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that Americans use guns to frighten away intruders who are breaking into their homes about 498,000 times per year.[20]



* A 1982 survey of male felons in 11 state prisons dispersed across the U.S. found:[21]



• 34% had been "scared off, shot at, wounded, or captured by an armed victim"

• 40% had decided not to commit a crime because they "knew or believed that the victim was carrying a gun"

• 69% personally knew other criminals who had been "scared off, shot at, wounded, or captured by an armed victim"[22]

Link to page:

Gun Control - Just Facts
 
There is absolutely no way to make the statement your opponent made ( a gun is far more likely to be used in a domestic violence situation, then it is likely to be used in a self defense situation) with any actual validity because the number of domestic assaults where a gun is used isn't even tracked as a separate item under the UCR standards used by the FBI.

Nor is there any really reliable data on defensive gun uses other than from newspaper accounts, which doesn't' begin to touch the total number since the majority of DGU cases don't result in a shot fired and never make the paper, much less a police report in many cases.

When the antis trot out this kind of nonsense, they inevitably use either a very flawed "source" for their data or make it up out of whole cloth.

I know the justice department has estimated DGUs in the high hundreds of thousands, other researchers, such as Dr. Gary Kleck, have estimated more than 2 million DGUs per year in peer-reviewed work. Even if the "actual" number was the lowest estimate i've ever seen, (250,000 per year) that dwarfs any crime statistic in which guns were misused by criminals.

The antis are notorious for trotting out "cooked" numbers, counting teens killed by police and homeowners while engaged in a felony as "kids killed by guns," or using absolutely shattered "statistics" from 40 years ago to make their point. (Example, the widely discredited and well-documented as factually incorrect claim by the AMA back in the 70s that guns are 40 times more likely to be used against a family member than against a criminal).

Arguing with someone who insists on using and defending these cooked up "data points" is like arguing with a conspiracy theorist. You can't win. Every time you completely shoot down one set of BS "statistics" they trot out another set of BS, never acknowledging that the last set was a LIE, and never admitting that the fact that most of their "data" are lies, distortions or half-truths, which, by Occam's Razor, would tend to show that position as highly suspect at best.

There is one statistic that can't be argued with: Our crime rate, including murders, has been dropping at precipitous rates every single year while the number of guns in America has been skyrocketing. If guns cause crime, that statistic, which isn't even remotely debatable, wouldn't be happening.

And since you're TWICE as likely to get raped and THREE TIMES as likely to be assaulted in England, which has never had more than a handful of guns per capita and now has a virtual ban on ALL privately owned guns, firearms are not, in themselves, a causal factor for crime.

The WORST thing you can say about guns with any validity at all (and there are counters to this), is that it makes homicide attempts more likely to succeed. In other words, all things being equal, a gun is a better tool for killing than other weapons. This same thing is exactly what makes a gun in the hands of an honest citizen a deterrent and a defense. A gun gives a 70 year-old woman an actual chance against a young male attacker.

Since an enormous percentage of homicides in this country involve one violent criminal killing another violent criminal, I look at the murder rate as something other than a stand-alone figure. I realize the folks at the Brady Center or VPC or Handgun Control, Inc. (Whatever name they're using this year) think that a dead gang member killed by another gang member is just as much a tragedy as a woman murdered after being raped. I beg to differ with that opinion.

Long story short is that pro-gun people don't have to cook a single number or make anything up, nor distort what guns can and cannot do to make their point. the other side does almost nothing BUT lie and distort. I think logic should indicate which side is credible and which is not, based on that fact alone.
 
I can say from personal experience a fist is used many more times than any gun was ever used in a domestic abuse situation. I have seen a gun used more times in a defensive posture more times than in a aggressive domestic dispute. I will say that this observation is only based on 22 years experience as a cop and not as a numbers cruncher. Therefore I decline to say that I am any type of an expert.
 
ask them to provide stats for their position or are they just passing on what they heard, if opinions they heard then explain to them about opinions how everyone has one and that they all stink and to talk to you after they have facts.
 
Read Gary Kleck's excellent Guncite.com, or his seminal work Point Blank.
http://rkba.org/research/kleck/point-blank-summary

Firstly, DGU's are astonishingly common, but they're vastly underreported because nobody gets shot and the would-be victim would rather not tell the cops that he drew and/or pointed his weapon at somebody.

Second, the people who use firearms in DV crimes are almost always "known to the police," meaning they are households with multiple priors, typically for DUII, drugs, and juvenile delinquency. Ordinary citizens who are gun owners do not have increased rates of DV compared to non-gun households.

Finally, suicide by gun is common in households that have guns, but in statewide analyses, easy-access states have no higher suicide rates than states where guns aren't readily accessible. You could logically conclude that the gun is the means, but not the motivation for suicide.
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Guns in America | Facts and statistics about firearms in the USA

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my logic tells me that a firearm introduced into a spousal abuse situation changes it from domestic violence to assault with a deadly weapon, attempted murder, or self defense.
 

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