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Old 04-12-2007, 01:12 PM
Mathurin Mathurin is offline
Political Novice
 
Join Date: May 2006
Posts: 21
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Sam View Post
I do not think guns are useless objects and I believe in the right to own guns if you are not a convicted felon however Sydney there is some basis to the statisitics. Here is a link

[link removed because the forum wont let me post it- mat]

From this link with CDC stats

Does a Gun in the Home Make You Safer?

No. Despite claims by the National Rifle Association (NRA) that you need a gun in your home to protect yourself and your family, public health research demonstrates that the person most likely to shoot you or a family member with a gun already has the keys to your house. Simply put: guns kept in the home for self-protection are more often used to kill somebody you know than to kill in self-defense; 22 times more likely, according to a 1998 study by the Journal of Trauma.[1] More kids, teenagers and adult family members are dying from firearms in their own home than criminal intruders. When someone is home, a gun is used for protection in fewer than two percent of home invasion crimes.[2] You may be surprised to know that, in 1999, according to the FBI's Uniform Crime Report, there were only 154 justifiable homicides committed by private citizens with a firearm compared with a total of 8,259 firearm murders in the United States. Once a bullet leaves a gun, who is to say that it will stop only a criminal and not a family member? Yet at every opportunity the NRA uses the fear of crime to promote the need for ordinary citizens to keep guns in their home for self-protection. Furthermore, the NRA continues to oppose life-saving measures that require safe-storage of guns in the home.
this stat may be misleading
every year there are approximatly 30k firearm deaths
20k of them are suicides, a large portion of them are probably purchased for the sole purpose of suicide. so saying that a gun in the home (which is just one way of saying firearms ownership) is more likely to kill someone living there is a perversion of the truth

also, not all "home defense" uses of a firearm are tracked, if nothing actually happened then why report it, its just paperwork and without some kind of ID they will never catch the guy
firearm defense is not synonymous with justifiable homicide
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