Reply #24: excuse me [View All]

[iverglas]

You had no trouble believing them 3 posts ago when they were estimating 800k violent crimes committed with firearms.

I assumed that when you said:

I provided a post a month or so back ( http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.ph... ) that gave a break-down of not only BenEzra's oft-quoted homicide statistics, but also robberies, aggravated assaults, rapes, and every other bad thing done with firearms I could find annual statistics for.

you were talking about reported crimes. Crimes for which police reports were filled out, and in many cases charges laid and convictions obtained and sentences passed. Not "estimates" of anything. You might want to clarify.


Surveys have been performed

Yes indeed. Just not quite the same thing as collecting data on crimes reported to police, is it?

The great big fat question that arises so easily is: how come those 3 million attempted violent crimes were NOT reported to police, and thus are not included in those actual STATISTICS?

What I want somebody to do is estimate the proportion of the population that has a firearm to hand at any given moment, and thus is in a position to use it to ward off bad guys.

And use that to work out a rate of what proportion of those people have used a firearm to ward off bad guys.

And then apply that rate to the rest of the population, the ones who did not have a firearm to hand when someone tried to victimize them. And tell us why there aren't really just a whooooole lot more robberies and murders and suchlike in the actual statistics, arising out of people without firearms to hand being victimized and unable to avert the offence.

I think it would be not unreasonable to say that 3 million represents at least the number of people with a firearm to hand at any given moment. So on average, each of them wards off a violent crime using a firearm each year.

As I always say: if they're that unlucky, no wonder they feel it necessary to promenade around festooned in firearms.

The rest of the population must just be amazingly lucky, I guess.