Federal Study On Guns & Victims

White House Study Finds Guns Save Lives: “Consistently Lower Injury Rates Among Gun Using Crime Victims”

Mac Slavo June 27th, 2013

Though statistics prove time and again that disarming a free people leads to more violent crime and the potential for mass government democide, it hasn’t stopped President Barrack Obama and his Congressional entourage from doing everything in their power to make it more difficult for Americans to legally own firearms.

Citing the Sandy Hook mass shooting last year, democrats on the hill have claimed that we must restrict gun ownership and strip the Second Amendment for the safety of our children and the general public.

But a new report commissioned by the White House titled Priorities for Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-related Violence suggests what many self defense gun proponents have been saying for years. The report, ordered under one of President Obama’s 23 Executive Orders signed in the wake of the Sandy Hook incident, asked the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the National Research Council and other federal agencies to identify the “most pressing problems in firearms violence.”

To the surprise of the authors and those who would no doubt have used the report to further restrict access to personal defense firearms, the study found that gun ownership actually saves lives and those who have a firearm at their disposal improve their chances of survival and reduce their chance of injury in the event they are confronted by a violent criminal:

Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year……

The estimate of 3 million defensive uses per year is based on an extrapolation from a small number of responses taken from more than 19 national surveys. The former estimate of 108,000 is difficult to interpret because respondents were not asked specifically about defensive gun use.

A different issue is whether defensive use of guns, however numerous or rare they may be, are effective in preventing injury to the gun wielding crime victim. Studies that directly assessed the effect of actual defensive uses of guns (i.e., incidents in which a gun was “used” by the crime victim in the sense of attacking or threatening an offender) have found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other self protective strategies.

Full Study available at the National Academy of Sciences