If you only watch the legacy mainstream media or listen to anti-2A politicians in Washington, D.C. and in your state, county, and city, then, you almost certainly have only heard about gun use in the criminal sense.
And I’m not here to minimize that. After all, criminal gun use is a horrible thing. Threatening, hurting, and killing innocent people is awful and is to be condemned.
But if that’s all that you’re familiar with, then, you’re not hearing the whole story.
For example, you’re only hearing about the number of gun violence deaths every year. Chip Brownlee notes that there were 16.576 deaths due to gun violence, excluding suicides “which account for more than half of all gun deaths.”
Now, for perspective, those statistics are from the Gun Violence Archive which is an anti-2A organization with incentives to make the situation look worse that it really is in an effort to persuade Americans to give up their Second Amendment rights.
To give context to those gun violence statistics so that you actually get a better idea of the reality of the overall situation: a report over at ammo.com notes, “Reports consistently show that there are between 60,000 and 2,500,000 defensive gun uses per year.”
Now, even if we assume that the Gun Violence Archive’s statistics are accurate and aren’t inflated, then, total gun deaths in the U.S., including suicides, were 40,000, even 50,000, which is still be less than the consistently reported 60,000 to 2.5 million defensive gun uses every year.
In other words, gun control would mean less people having been able to defend themselves than were killed using firearms.
In fact, that same ammo.com report states, “There are an average of 1,820,000 defensive gun uses per year compared to 1,100,000 reported crimes.”
Yes, an average of 1.82 million defensive gun uses per year.
Tell me again how gun control will save lives… You can’t?
That’s right, if you’re being honest, you can’t. Because gun control doesn’t save lives.
Now, we can (and should) have the hard conversations about why so many people are being assaulted and killed.
The tool that violent people use isn’t the issue, though. The issue is the person and why they feel comfortable with, feel justified in doing, and feel that they need to commit violence. Because those are the issues that actually need to be addressed if we want to reduce the number of assaults and murders in our world.
Taking our Second Amendment rights won’t help those figures at all.
