These statistics seem to be made up to me. This isn't the country I know. I live in a town of about 20,000 people. People do not carry here and there is virtually no crime. There probably hasn't been a case of a gun being used for defence since the 1950s.
I guess if I ever felt the need to carry a gun to feel safe I would move. I do however keep a shotgun by my bed.
I'm glad you feel safe in your community. I presume you are aware there are other communities that are not so safe, and that even "safe" places can have troubles.
I live in a rural area about fifteen miles from a smallish city. Last year we had a serial killer strike repeatedly in this area, one of his victims was someone I knew who lived only a couple miles up the road.
While there is some controversy over Kleck's numbers, it is scientific and statistical fact that guns are used defensively
many times more often than they are used to murder. Deny it if you wish, but it is true.
Number Of Protective Uses Of Firearms In U.S: Projected at a minimum of 2.5 million cases annually, equal to 1% of total U.S. population each year. Criminal assailants are killed by their victims or others in only about 0.1%, and wounded in only about 1.0% of incidents as described above. Most such crimes are prevented by mere presence of a firearm in the hands of an intended victim.(Dr. Gary Kleck, PhD, Florida State University, Targeting Guns, 1998)
A 1993 Gallup Poll study (hardly a conservative partisan group) found a likely annual rate of defensive gun use (DGU) of 777,153 per year in the US.
An LA Times 1994 study found an implied national DGU of 3,609,682.
National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS).
Data from the NCVS imply that each year there are only about 68,000 defensive uses of guns in connection with assaults and robberies, [16] or about 80,000 to 82,000 if one adds in uses linked with household burglaries. [17] These figures are less than one ninth of the estimates implied by the results of at least thirteen other surveys, summarized in Table 1, most of which have been previously reported. [18] The NCVS estimates imply that about 0.09 of 1% of U.S. households experience a defensive gun use (DGU) in any one year, compared to the Mauser survey's estimate of 3.79% of households over a five year period, or about 0.76% in any one year, assuming an even distribution over the five year period, and no repeat uses. [19]
The strongest evidence that a measurement is inaccurate is that it is inconsistent with many other independent measurements or observations of the same phenomenon; indeed, some would argue that this is ultimately the only way of knowing that a measurement is wrong. Therefore, one might suppose that the gross inconsistency of the NCVS-based estimates with all other known estimates, each derived from sources with no known flaws even remotely substantial enough to account for nine-to-one, or more, discrepancies, would be sufficient to persuade any serious scholar that the NCVS estimates are unreliable.
...The NCVS was not designed to estimate how often people resist crime using a gun. It was designed primarily to estimate national victimization levels; it incidentally happens to include a few self-protection questions which include response categories covering resistance with a gun.
The Kleck study concluded that there were possibly as many as 2.5 million defensive gun uses per year, many of which involved no shots fired or no one injured, and many of which were not reported:
The most technically sound estimates presented in Table 2 are those based on the shorter one-year recall period that rely on Rs' first-hand accounts of their own experiences (person-based estimates). These estimates appear in the first two columns. They indicate that each year in the U.S. there are about 2.2 to 2.5 million DGUs of all types by civilians against humans, with about 1.5 to 1.9 million of the incidents involving use of handguns.
While I doubt the real number is as high as 2.5 million, it is probably far higher than the gov't numbers (82,000). Even if you accept the low-ball figures from the NCVS study, it would mean guns were used for defense about six times as often as for murder. The reality is probably between the two extremes.
A man threatened my father's life once, in a case of mistaken identity, and only backed off when my father pulled out his pistol. My mother once ran off a burglar by firing a shot into the floor. I backed down a pair of young men who tried to ambush me with a pistol. That's one family over the course of about 30 years. My "anecdotal stats" would be that 3 out of 20 (my extended family) used guns defensively over the course of 30 years, or about 15% in 3 decades. Translated to the national population of 300 million, that would be about 1.5 million uses a year nationally. I think that's probably about average, as it is midway between Kleck's high number and NCVS's low number.
Guns in the hands of law abiding citizens save lives and stop crime. Period.