This is a snip from an essay I wrote on the 2nd amendment for my English professor.
According to the book, Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense With a Gun written by Dr. Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz, guns are used 2.5 million times a year by law-abiding citizens in self-defense. That breaks down to about 6,850 times a day(86).
On it's website The National Safety Council says the total number of gun deaths accounts for less than 30,000 deaths per year. This means that firearms are used eighty times more often to protect the lives of honest citizens than to take lives. Looking at the break down of these 2.5 million cases, we find that a large majority of the time merely brandishing a weapon or firing a warning shot to scare off the attacker is all that was required. Less than 8% of the time is the attacker wounded or killed.
Even anti-gun criminologists Philip Cook and Jens Ludwig from the Clinton Administration published a study in 1997 called “Guns in America” for The National Institute of Justice. In this study they admitted that according to the Justice Department there are as many as 1.5 million cases a year where guns are used in self-defense. George Will in “Are we a Nation of Cowards'?” wrote for Newsweek in 1993 that armed citizens kill more criminals than police do every year, by a margin of almost two to one (1527 to 606). Newsweek readers learned “Only 2% of civilian shootings involved an innocent person mistakenly identified as a criminal. The 'error rate' for the police was more than 11%, more than five times as high.” Some 200,000 women use a gun to defend themselves against sexual abuse every year.
