Estimating the Number of DGUs

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23. You would lose the Ponderosa.

A DGU is the use of a firearm, whether fired or not, to stop the further commission of a violent crime against a person. If you just show the gun, and the mugger runs away, that is a valid DGU. Sometimes a DGU does involve firing shots, sometimes killing the felon.

Now your Ponderosa bet is that 1,000 is the extreme upper limit for DGU's

Let's count corpses. The FBI 2011 data table shows 201 justifiable homicides by private citizens using a gun against a criminal during a felony. It is well known that the FBI number is low by about half. The reason for this is that police will often list a DGU as a murder during the initial report, only to go back later and change it to justifiable homicide when the investigation is complete. The FBI picks up on the initial report, but often the modified report isn't filed with the FBI.

This website shows 236 as the number for 2010. http://projects.wsj.com/murderdata/?mg=inert-wsj&standalone=1#view=all&circ=80&y=2010

Some states, such as NY, don't report justified homicides at all, since they aren't a crime.

But we will go with the FBI number, rounded to 200 as the number of dead perps killed by DGU, mostly by handguns. It is well known that most people survive being shot. About 80% (rounded from 78%) survive. http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/1997/02/24/knives-00006/

So to get 200 dead thugs you need to shoot about 1,000. Now add in the thugs that run away at the sight of a gun. There are no firm numbers on that but the percentage is easily in the high 90s. Even if it is only half, that still doubles the 1,000 to 2,000.

I will take the deed to the Ponderosa now.

Trying for a more realistic figure will take some assumptions.
About half of all homes (About 65 million housing units) have a gun, and about 10 millions folks have CCWs. According to the FBI there were about 1.2 million violent crimes in the US in 2011, and 9 million property crimes. That is 10 million felony crimes per year. If only 1% of those 10 million crimes are interrupted by a gun then you have 100,000 DGUs annually. I would submit that more than 1% of crimes are interrupted by armed citizens annually.

Now you owe me many Poderosas.

Let us suppose that a DGU is a rare ev