"We don't want to take your guns" Exept New Jersey wants to.

[spin]

83. True, firearms never are used for legitimate self defense....

and if they are, it would have been far better if the victim was unarmed and had to spend months in a hospital recovering from the injuries or ended up in a casket.

How Often Do We Use Guns in Self-Defense?
By Paul Barrett December 27, 2012

***snip***

If guns have a countervailing benefit—that lawful firearm owners frequently or even occasionally use guns to defend themselves and their loved ones—then determining how aggressively to curb private possession becomes a more complicated proposition.

As with everything else concerning guns in this country, the DGU question prompts divergent answers. At one end of the spectrum, the NRA cites research by Gary Kleck, an accomplished criminologist at Florida State University. Based on self-reporting by survey respondents, Kleck has extrapolated that DGU occurs more than 2 million times a year. Kleck doesn’t suggest that gun owners shoot potential antagonists that often. DGU covers various scenarios, including merely brandishing a weapon and scaring off an aggressor.

At the other end of the spectrum, gun skeptics prefer to cite the work of David Hemenway, an eminent public-health scholar at Harvard University. Hemenway, who analogizes gun violence to an epidemic and guns to the contagion, argues that Kleck’s research significantly overestimates the frequency of DGU.

The carping back and forth gets pretty technical, but the brief version is that Hemenway believes Kleck includes too many “false positives”: respondents who claim they’ve chased off burglars or rapists with guns but probably are boasting or, worse, categorizing unlawful aggressive conduct as legitimate DGU. Hemenway finds more reliable an annual federal government research project, called the National Crime Victimization Survey, which yields estimates in the neighborhood of 100,000 defensive gun uses per year. Making various reasonable-sounding adjustments, other social scientists have suggested that perhaps a figure somewhere between 250,000 and 370,000 might be more accurate....emphasis added
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-12-27/how-often-do-we-use-guns-in-self-defense

There is absolutely no doubt that all too often firearms are misused and tragedy results. That's one side of the debate. There is also no doubt that firearms can be and are used to stop violent attacks. That's the other side of the debate.

If you were a powerful sorcerer you might have the ability to develop a magic spell that would render all firearms, except those in the hands of authorities, inoperable in our nation. I have no doubt that if you waved your magic wand and the spell took effect, firearm crime would cease.

If so, the criminal element would not be all that concerned as they would simply attack the weaker members of our society without fear. (I suspect many criminals are strong gun control advocates. Firearms in the hands of honest citizens pose a significant workplace safety hazard for many in the violent criminal profession.)

But of course sorcery is a lost art in our modern society. There is no way that you could ban and confiscate all the firearms in our nation. Even if you managed to pass the necessary laws to do so, many citizens would simply refuse to comply. I have often heard of many people who fear that an attempt will be made to disarm America and have stored caches of weapons and ammunition just in case it might happen. (Of course I have never met such people.)

The solution is not to ban all guns. In my opinion the solution is for both sides of the debate to accept the fact that the argument of the other side has some validity and to work to find compromise that will help insure that firearm ownership in our nation is limited to honest, sane and responsible people as much as is possible. There is no way we can eliminate all gun violence in our nation but we could do far better than we are today.

I feel this will never happen as long as some on the gun control side insist the solution is to ban all firearms. I had great hope that we would see some real improvement to our national gun laws this year after the tragedy at the Sandy Hook Elementary School. The poison pill that ruined that possibility was the insistence by those in the gun control movement that we pass another assault weapons ban at the national level.