"Gun Violence Archive" is one guy with a website and a facebook page.
According to his writings, he runs automated programs that search police archives, online newspapers, etc., for mentions of gun usage.
As if someone defending themselves with a gun, would call either a newspaper or a cop to report it afterward.
"Defensive gun usages" should include ALL incidents where someone says to an attempted mugger, "Back off, I have a gun." or, pulls out the gun, whereupon the attacker runs away. Or fires a warning shot, same result.
This "Gun Violence Archives" person carefully avoids all such mentions.
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President Obama issued a number of Executive Orders about guns. One of them gave money to the Center for Disease Control, to study what happens when people own guns.
http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=18319&page=R1
The study that resulted, showed that far more crimes were deterred by private people with their own guns, than were committed.
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A study done by the U.S. Dept. of Justice under the Clinton administration in the 1990s, found that 3.1 million people reported using a gun defensively to stop or deter crime in the year 1994 alone. Many of them reported multiple uses, with a total of 23 million incidents of Defensive Gun Usage that year.
https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles/165476.pdf
Such uses include times when the gun was only mentioned, times when the gun was produced in view of the criminal, times when it was fired with no one injured, times when the criminal was injured, and times when the criminal was killed. Of course, in the large majority of incidents, the gun was not fired, or was deliberately fired into the air (warning shot). In the vast majority of incidents, the criminal(s) either fled, or surrendered and was taken into custody.
The study states flatly that "
guns are used far more often to defend against crime than to perpetrate crime."
Other studies by other groups, including a recent one by the Obama administration, have shown similar patterns.
As you can probably guess, these studies have received very little coverage in the mainstream media.
These results compile only the people who freely admitted to a stranger calling on the phone and saying he was from the government, that they had used their gun to defend themselves in a crime incident. The number of people who declined to answer, is not included.
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Let the nonsense begin...
