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Old 01-30-2006, 01:28 PM   #31 (permalink)
The_Dunedan
Junkie
 
The problem is that more than 75% of all DGUs end without the gun ever having been fired. This distorts the DGU/accident/suicide data because while any accidental gun death or suicide obviously ends in a dead body, less than 25% of DGUs do. To obtain a meaningful comparison, you would need to compare ALL DGUs ( firing and non-firing ) to accidents and suicides across-the-board. The CDC figures only take into account those incidents in which a corpse hit the floor; they "ignore" the 75%+ of 2,000,000 DGUs ( yearly ) in which the defender's weapon is not fired. Once these non-firing DGUs are taken into account, the numbers of accidents and suicides ( particularly among children ) seem paltry in comparison.

Your data supports the conclusion that a gun in the home is, perhaps ( and this is a BIG perhaps ), more likely to -kill- a resident than an intruder. It is not, however, more likely to be -used against- a resident than an intruder.

It should also be noted that the Brady Bunch and HCI count any person under the age of 25 as a "child" and list their death as a "gun violence death" no matter the manner in which it occurred. Their numbers include 20-year-old gangbangers shot in self defense, criminals shot by the cops, and at least one instance of a 22-year-old soldier killed in Iraq. Reduce the "child" threshold to something more reasonable, like 15 years, and the total nationwide figure hovers at less than 1,000 deaths per annum.
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