imported post
bcronnie wrote:
okay, I know criminals don't register guns and guns don't kill people only idiots using them do but still, please people, keep the guns out of the parks. The parks are small islands of sanity in what is more and more an insane planet. The rangers are right in saying that bringing weapons into the park endagers the wildlife far more than there is arisk of animal to human or humanto human conflict. Bringing weapons will only see the number of incidents escalate.
The NRA and open carry assertions that people need to defend themselves falls pretty flat in the face of the number of incidents of where gun toting 'law abiding' individuals act to carry out or assist in the prevention of 'crime'. Let us see some statistics backing up this 'urban myth' if there are any.
Those statistics are easy to find. They are from a variety of sources. From Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz, "Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense With a Gun," 86 The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Northwestern University School of Law, 1 (Fall 1995) we find that guns are 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. 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.
Dr. Kleck is a professor in the school of criminology and criminal justice at Florida State University in Tallahassee. He has researched extensively and published several essays on the gun control issue. His book, Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America, has become a widely cited source in the gun control debate. In fact, this book earned Dr. Kleck the prestigious American Society of Criminology Michael J. Hindelang award for 1993. This award is given for the book published in the past two to three years that makes the most outstanding contribution to criminology.
Even those who don't like the conclusions Dr. Kleck reaches, cannot argue with his impeccable research and methodology. In "A Tribute to a View I Have Opposed," Marvin E. Wolfgang writes that, "What troubles me is the article by Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz. The reason I am troubled is that they have provided an almost clear-cut case of methodologically sound research in support of something I have theoretically opposed for years, namely, the use of a gun in defense against a criminal perpetrator. . . . I have to admit my admiration for the care and caution expressed in this article and this research. Can it be true that about two million instances occur each year in which a gun was used as a defensive measure against crime? It is hard to believe. Yet, it is hard to challenge the data collected. We do not have contrary evidence." Wolfgang, "A Tribute to a View I Have Opposed," The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology. Wolfgang says there is no "contrary evidence." Indeed, there are more than a dozen national polls—one of which was conducted by The Los Angeles Times—that have found figures comparable to the Kleck-Gertz study. Even the Clinton Justice Department (through the National Institute of Justice) found there were as many as 1.5 million defensive users of firearms every year. See National Institute of Justice, "Guns in America: National Survey on Private Ownership and Use of Firearms," Research in Brief (May 1997).
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 with a firearm 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. "Guns in America: National Survey on Private Ownership and Use of Firearms," NIJ Research in Brief (May 1997); The finding of 1.5 million yearly self-defense cases did not sit well with the anti-gun bias of the study’s authors, who attempted to explain why there could not possibly be one and a half million cases of self-defense every year. Nevertheless, the 1.5 million figure is consistent with a mountain of independent surveys showing similar figures. The sponsors of these studies—nearly a dozen—are quite varied, and include anti-gun organizations, news media organizations, governments and commercial polling firms.
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