Very Experienced and Knowledgeable Blogger on Everything to do with Gun Control

Found this blog post An Opinion on Gun Control by a guy who obviously knows what he's talking about, Larry Correia.  It's a very lengthy article but well worth reading in my opinion.  I've been finding it too hard to single out particular statements to post here but I'm working on it and may eventually get it down to a reasonable enough size for that.

Meanwhile I'll just say that this guy has extensive knowledge and experience with guns, having owned a gun store that sold to law enforcement and having given instruction in concealed-carry, including to teachers in the state of Utah.  He's done a lot of research into all aspects of the questions people keep asking about the gun control issues and in my opinion gives the most thorough and trustworthy information and opinion on the subject I've run across so far.

OK, here's a section of the article I do want to post here, where he talks about how prevention of crime by guns doesn't get registered in the statistics:

It doesn’t really make sense to ban guns, because in reality what that means is that you are actually banning effective self-defense. Despite the constant hammering by a news media with an agenda, guns are used in America far more to stop crime than to cause crime.

I’ve seen several different sets of numbers about how many times guns are used in self-defense every year. The problem with keeping track of this stat is that the vast majority of the time when a gun is produced in a legal self-defense situation no shots are fired. The mere presence of the gun is enough to cause the criminal to stop.

Clint Smith once said if you look like food, you will be eaten. Criminals are looking for prey. They are looking for easy victims. If they wanted to work hard for a living they’d get a job. So when you pull a gun, you are no longer prey, you are work, so they are going to go find somebody else to pick on.

So many defensive gun uses never get tracked as such. From personal experience, I have pulled a gun exactly one time in my entire life. I was legally justified and the bad guy stopped, put his gun away, and left. (15 years later the same son of a bitch would end up murdering a local sheriff’s deputy). My defensive gun use was never recorded anywhere as far as I know. My wife has pulled a gun twice in her life. Once on somebody who was acting very rapey who suddenly found a better place to be when she stuck a Ruger in his face, and again many years later on a German Shepherd which was attacking my one year old son. (amazingly enough a dog can recognize a 9mm coming out of a fanny pack and run for its life, go figure) No police report at all on the second one, and I don’t believe the first one ever turned up as any sort of defensive use statistic, all because no shots were fired.

So how often are guns actually used in self-defense in America? http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcdguse.html

On the high side the estimate runs around 2.5 million defensive gun uses a year, which dwarfs our approximately 16,000 homicides in any recent year, only 10k of which are with guns.  http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm

Of those with guns, only a couple hundred are with rifles. So basically, the guns that the anti-gunners are the most spun up about only account for a tiny fraction of all our murders.

But let’s not go with the high estimate. Let’s go with some smaller ones instead. Let’s use the far more conservative 800,000 number which is arrived at in multiple studies. That still dwarfs the number of illegal shootings. Heck, let’s even run with the number once put out by the people who want to ban guns, the Brady Center, which was still around 108,000, which still is an awesome ratio of good vs. bad.

So even if you use the worst number provided by people who are just as biased as me but in the opposite direction, gun use is a huge net positive. Or to put it another way, the Brady Center hates guns so much that they are totally cool with the population of a decent sized city getting raped and murdered every year as collateral damage in order to get what they want.

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Dec 31:  Hey, finally a major media statement against further gun control, citing the UK and Australia as NOT good examples of positive results of strict gun control, in The Wall Street Journal


http://www.evcforum.net/dm.php?control=msg&m=684038

http://www.evcforum.net/dm.php?control=msg&m=684020

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1791/did-hitler-ban-gun-ownership

All the links from Chris Pinto's site:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/6438601/Gun-crime-doubles-in-a-decade.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-153817/Gun-crime-doubled-figures-set-show.html

http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2012/12/11/gun-crime-soars-in-england-where-guns-are-banned-n1464528

http://www.gunssavelife.com/?p=3937

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/2640817.stm

http://www.politics.co.uk/reference/gun-crime

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKdBxpKqUvs

http://www.military.com/video/guns/small-arms/australias-gun-ban-not-working-so-well/1775480805001/