The Antis Say: "A gun is more likely to be used against you ..."

[troyPhD]

Aren't they wondering why no one at VT was able to disarm the shooter immediately? After all, when someone carries a gun, it is more likely to be used against him/her.



I guess logic rarely ever prevails.

[Satex]

If that's the case, we should disarm all those police officers, since those are the ones we see the most - those are the ones most likely to be used against us.

[Wulf]

Aren't they wondering why no one at VT was able to disarm the shooter immediately? After all, when someone carries a gun, it is more likely to be used against him/her.

Well, you know, they probably did disarm him, but then of curse THEY had the gun, so he took it back from them. Its complicated.....

[DedEye]

Aren't they wondering why no one at VT was able to disarm the shooter immediately? After all, when someone carries a gun, it is more likely to be used against him/her.



I guess logic rarely ever prevails.

Good point, never thought about it that way.

[shark92651]

I've heard that argument for years. It's flawed, to say the least. Like most of the tripe the antis spout they have no stats to back this up.

[leelaw]

Well...

It wasn't a matter of being disarmed, but the shooters gun WAS used against him, once he got bored with killing innocents.

[DrjonesUSA]

Aren't they wondering why no one at VT was able to disarm the shooter immediately? After all, when someone carries a gun, it is more likely to be used against him/her.



I guess logic rarely ever prevails.

That's a very, very good point.

Whenever someone says "we need stronger gun control so that criminals won't get guns" you can say, "it's ok, you can just take it away from him and use it against him, like everyone says will happen if you try to keep a gun for protection."

I'd love to see precisely how someone would manage to pry my 1911 out of my hands WITHOUT getting a few extra holes put in them first.

Anyone care to volunteer?

[Knight]

I hate that "statistic" more than any other, if not for how often it is used then for how utterly idiotic, ignorant, and just plain dated the argument is.

This is one of the best summaries that I've found:

http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcdgaga.html

There are others, if you look for them. Educate yourselves, and be prepared next time someone attempts to throw that stupid "statistic" in your face!

Edit: Here's a post that I made on a gun control discussion board when some anti-gunner threw out that statistic. I used the source linked above, as well as a few others that I no longer have linked:

I looked into this 43:1 argument in greater detail, because it seems like it is often used by the gun control side. Here's what I found.

Your statistic comes from the article "Protection or Peril?: An Analysis of Firearm-Related Deaths in the Home," published in the 1986 New England Journal of Medicine, and is written by Arthur L. Kellermann and Donald T. Reay. They got their statistic by adding up all of the gunshot deaths that occurred in King County, Washington, from 1978 to 1983, dividing them into two categories, legal intervention and everything else, and came up with these numbers:

Unintentional deaths: 12
Criminal homicide: 41
Suicide: 333
Unknown: 3
Total: 389
Self-protection homicide: 9

Something should immediately jump out at you here. Almost ALL of the "other" deaths accounted for in the "43" part of the 43:1 ratio are suicides. In other words, they most likely would have occured anyway regardless of the presence of the gun. And no, as far as I've found, there does not exist a definitive study that links increased access to guns with increased access to suicide. Most of the studies we have involving this subject involve other countries, such as Canada, which passed gun control legislation in 1979 and saw a decrease in gun suicides but an increase on other types of suicides that kept the overall suicide rate completely unchanged. Japan, New Zealand, Colombia, and Australia all have EXTREMELY strict gun control legislation in place, and their suicide rates are much higher than the U.S.

If you take out suicides in the equation, the ration drops down to 6:1. Which seems more reasonable. However, it is still a ridiculous way to measure the effectiveness of firearms as self-defense tools. Do we measure the effectiveness of our police forces by the number of bodies they produce at the end of the year? And I shouldn't have to remind you that firearms are used defensively without the attacker being killed FAR more often. Even when using the gun control advocates' statistic of 108,000 defensive gun uses annually (which has since been refuted by Dr. Gary Kleck's work in 1995), when compared to the 347 legal intervention gun deaths, you get a ratio of 311:1!!!

A study like this needs to take into account more factors than just deaths. The type of home where the death occured, for example. Doesn't it make some sense that homes with convicted felons, people with mental illness related to violence, or with histories of domestic abuse calls make up the majority of homes where gun homicides occur (which they in fact do [Dave Kopel, Independence Institute, 2001])?

The statement made by Kellermann and Reay is outdated (1986?!), flawed, and does not take into account all the necessary factors. As long as you are a responsible, law-abiding citizen, having a gun in the home is a perfectly acceptable means to defending yourself and your family.

I posted that in November 2006, FYI.

[turinreza]

Gun control advocates state that if you have a gun it
will most likely be used against you.. .too bad out of 32
chances for that to happen it didn't happen .. no one
took the gun away from the shooter.. but on 33 the gun
did get turned against the shooter when he killed himself.

[anotherone]

"gun more likely to be turned against you" belongs in the same genre of urban legend as the babysitter who gets a phone call from a psycho and it ends up being from inside the house. My sister-in-law tells me this crap all the time and always explains how she's much safer without a gun. Ironically she has been robbed twice... being "correct" sure gets expensive doesn't it?