Reply #75: No they don't say that

[BullDozer]

They say "According to the National Safety Council, the total number of gun deaths (by accidents, suicides and homicides) account for less than 35,000 deaths per year

LESS THAN that doesn't mean approximately 34,999 but you just go right ahead and keep on spinning.


You cited a footnote which is citing the National Safety Council, however the year(s) is not specified.

Are you going to claim that the numbers from CDC are wrong?

BTW Bill if you are going to use that GOA page for facts you also get to eat all of these others.

* Guns are used 2.5 million times a year in self-defense. Law-abiding citizens use guns to defend themselves against criminals as many as 2.5 million times every year -- or about 6,850 times a day.1 This means that each year, firearms are used more than 60 times more often to protect the lives of honest citizens than to take lives.2

* Locking up firearms can cost lives during a life-threatening situation. In California last year, two children died -- they were pitchforked to death by a crazed drug addict -- because a resident in the home could not access the household firearms in time. The guns were locked up in deference to California state law.3

* Guns are the Great Equalizer for women. As many as 200,000 women use a gun every year to defend themselves against sexual abuse.4

* Law-abiding gun owners are a good form of crime control. Citizens shoot and kill at least twice as many criminals as police do every year (1,527 to 606).5

1 Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz, "Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense With a Gun," 86 The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Northwestern University School of Law, 1 (Fall 1995):164. The 2.5 million figure is consistent with a mountain of other independent surveys showing similar figures. The sponsors of these studies -- nearly a dozen -- are quite varied, and include anti-gun organizations, news media organizations, governments and commercial polling firms. For example, even anti-gun researchers who were commissioned by the Clinton Justice Department found there are as many as 1.5 million cases of self-defense with a firearm every year.

2 According to the National Safety Council, the total number of gun deaths (by accidents, suicides and homicides) account for less than 35,000 deaths per year. This means that fewer Americans die by guns than by other common items such as cars (40,000 plus yearly) or doctors (about 98,000 per year). See Injury Facts, published yearly by the National Safety Council, Itasca, Illinois. For statistics on deaths due to medical mistakes, see the Institute of Medicine, which is a division of the National Academy of Sciences.

3 Kimi Yoshino, "Gun advocates say fear of liability keeps parents from teaching survival skills," The Fresno Bee (August 26, 2000). Removing a trigger lock can be somewhat tricky -- even in a non-emergency. Maryland Governor Parris Glendening struggled for at least two whole minutes to remove a trigger lock at a training session in March 2000.

4 Kleck and Gertz, "Armed Resistance to Crime," at 185

5 Kleck, Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America, (1991):111-116, 148.