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For every example like this, there are examples of the hero accidentally killing or wounding someone other than the criminal.
* Guns used 2.5 million times a year in self-defense. Law-abiding citizens use guns to defend themselves against criminals as many as 2.5 million times every year -- or about 6,850 times a day.1 This means that each year, firearms are used more than 80 times more often to protect the lives of honest citizens than to take lives.2
* Of the 2.5 million times citizens use their guns to defend themselves every year, the overwhelming majority merely brandish their gun or fire a warning shot to scare off their attackers. Less than 8% of the time, a citizen will kill or wound his/her attacker.3
* As many as 200,000 women use a gun every year to defend themselves against sexual abuse.4
* Even anti-gun Clinton researchers concede that guns are used 1.5 million times annually for self-defense
*According to the Clinton Justice Department, there are as many as 1.5 million cases of self-defense every year. The National Institute of Justice published this figure in 1997 as part of "Guns in America" -- a study which was authored by noted anti-gun criminologists Philip Cook and Jens Ludwig.5
* Armed citizens kill more crooks than do the police. Citizens shoot and kill at least twice as many criminals as police do every year (1,527 to 606).6
And readers of Newsweek learned that "only 2 percent of civilian shootings involved an innocent person mistakenly identified as a criminal. The 'error rate' for the police, however, was 11 percent, more than five times as high."7
* Handguns are the weapon of choice for self-defense. Citizens use handguns to protect themselves over 1.9 million times a year.8 Many of these self-defense handguns could be labeled as "Saturday Night Specials."
B. Concealed carry laws help reduce crime... Read more: gunowners.org...
it is not a magic shield protecting you from crazy people.
You could have had several people in the theater armed with handguns and this would still have happened for the following reasons -
Originally posted by svetlana84
Looking at the stats, the US with one of the most liberal gun laws also has the most people killed by guns - by far.
Originally posted by nonono
Yep... to stop massacres, all we need is more weapons! It's so obvious! lol
I can see why Americans want to be armed and thats because you have a lot of guns in your population. Yet it is sort of paradoxical. For example in a country where there is so few guns there is no need to own or carry a gun.
Originally posted by nonono
reply to post by getreadyalready
As a matter of fact, the killer could have been stopped by any normal unarmed man... he wasn't, because most people are cowards. A gun wouldn't have changed that. I also lol'd at your mention of Hitler... you guys act like a gun will stop dictators. Protip: it won't. See: the USA. All your guns are doing nothing to keep the tyrants in check. So enjoy massacre after massacre after massacre... and please, don't forget that guns don't kill people, guns do. I'll still be laughing at you from the safety of my gun-free house.