Quote:
Originally Posted by Suburban
Firearms are used in self-defense about 2.5 million times a year, and how often do you actually hear about it? Maybe if a grandmother is the one that pulled the gun, it's deemed interesting, and there's a 3 minute segment on the incident.
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Where do those numbers come from? I'm sorry, but that sounds impossible to believe.
Look at a reality check: The current population of the United States is about 304 million, of which over 20% is under the age of 15. For the sake of simplicity let us assume that these people have difficulty obtaining firearms and/or did not fire them defensively.
This leaves approximately 240 million people in the US. If we assume that every one of those people has equal access to a firearm (simply not true, but let's assume it for the sake of simplicity), then just over 1% of the total population would be involved in a self-defensive shooting incident every year.
1% doesn't sound like a lot, but it is. This site has about 9,000 members. That's not an extremely large number to generalize to the population, but following the 1% figure, it'd be logical to predict that approximately 90 people on this site would be involved in a defensive firearm shooting every year. Assuming shootings take place regularly throughout the year, then there should be about 8 incidents per month. That's 2 per week.
I think it's safe to assume that if a member of this forum were involved in a defensive shooting, he/she would start a thread about it. The forum should be full of them.