This article came across my Twitter feed today and after reading through it, I had a thought related to the gun control argument going on right now.
First, the majority of the case against guns lies in statistics. For one, there is no data to demonstrate that having a gun for self defense purposes is actually valid in practice. For two, where massacres are concerned, gun control advocates are quick to point out that none of them have ever been stopped by a citizen with a gun.
As to the first, I’d guess there’s a data problem. While there are police reports and so forth to aggregate data related to gun usage in crimes and the like, how would a researcher go about figuring out how many times a citizen pulls a weapon on a would be robber or whatever, which immediately causes the offender to retreat, and then nothing ever get reported? I’ve personally heard of a couple of stories along these lines- I suspect that’s the only way anyone would ever know.
As to the second statistic, well, if you read the above link you might already know where I’m going. There’s a definitional problem. A massacre becomes one because there’s only 1 (or a group) armed person firing at unarmed, defenseless citizens. But when someone is present to confront the attacker, then a massacre becomes no one dead, hopefully. As a second data point, there was a shooting in Clackamas, Oregon recently where the shooter was confronted by someone with a conceal carry. Only 2 people died and the shooter took his own life shortly after the individual with the concealed carry permit confronted him. Also notice, our hero here doesn’t exactly sound like a cowboy (from the article):
“I don’t ever want to see anyone that way ever,” said Meli. “It just bothers me.”