'Gun-Control' is Wrong for This World

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By Rob Morse. July 1st, 2019
Original Source

Everyone has their own perspective, but some beliefs are more accurate than others. That is certainly true about 'gun-control'. Do we have too little 'gun-control', or too much? Do we have too few firearms regulations or too many? Our answers say a lot about us, but the facts about 'gun-control' can be confusing.

If we live with angels, then there is nothing to fear so there is also no need for 'gun-control'. In contrast, if the world is filled with criminals, then gun control doesn’t work because everyone ignores our gun laws. We don’t live in either of those worlds. We don’t have to guess about the real world because we can look for ourselves and see what works and what fails.

We disarmed law abiding people who wanted to carry a concealed firearm in public. We disarmed them by charging them hundreds of dollars for their carry permit. We disarmed them by costing them days of training. We disarmed them by the bureaucracy taking months to get them their license. About 11 million people said it wasn’t worth the time, money and hassle. About 5 million more of us were disarmed in states that deny almost all concealed carry applications. By a conservative estimate, 'gun-control' disarmed 16 million good guys. Some people claim that we’re safer now that those 16 million law abiding people have been disarmed. We don’t have to guess.

We can ask how many of these disarmed people were injured each year because the state disarmed them. Self defense is real. We can approach the estimates from several observations.

What are the costs in human lives
when we turn the good guys into disarmed victims?

We have data from the the Center for Disease Control on rape and sexual assault where the victim survived the attack (non-fatal injury data). They recorded about 300 thousand sexual assaults in 2017. They know how many assaults were reported by victims over 21 years of age and thus by victims eligible to carry a firearm in public. I’ve calculated that 27 thousand of the victims were both of eligible age and were attacked outside their home where a carry permit is required.

I calculated about 1,800 sexual assault victims were disarmed by 'gun-control' each year.
That is important since victims who defend themselves with a gun
are almost never raped.

Armed defense is similar to sexual assault in that many of the attacks are never reported to the police. Widespread telephone surveys, with tens of thousands of respondents, estimate that between one-out-of-400 to as many as one-out-of-70 adults used a firearm for self defense. I combined those estimates with our 16 million individuals disarmed by 'gun-control'.

At a minimum, 40 thousand victims were victimized
because they were disarmed by gun control.
The higher estimate is almost a quarter million people.

I’m sorry that people were killed at work in a gun-free zone in Virginia last month. I’m sorry that children were attacked in a gun-free zone where their teachers were disarmed. Let’s take a very hard look at the people who were injured by 'gun-control' before we prescribe more of the same medicine that got them killed.

Sources-
https://webappa.cdc.gov/sasweb/ncipc/nfirates.html
https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=nvat&#8221
https://www.bestcolleges.com/resources/preventing-sexual-assault/
https://reason.com/2018/09/04/what-the-cdcs-mid-90s-surveys-on-defensi/

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