The escaped convicts from GA were caught by private citizens with guns

[Lee-Lee]

14. It's not spin, it's that the whole issue needs to be discussed and studied

Focusing on defensive use of guns without studying misuse and focusing on misuse without studying legitimate defensive uses are both flawed ways of thinking.

The goal should be the minimization of misuse while not placing obstacles in the patch of beneficial defensive use.

Part of the problem is even when funded it's hard to study defensive use. Misuse is easy- statstics are readily collected on shootings and things like armed robbery. Most defensive uses never result in a person being shot so it's much harder to study. There are no good statistics kept by police departments and they don't get nearly the same level of press coverage.

Another part of that is the wildly different standards used in defining what a defensive gun use is. Some of the more restrictive studies that place the number as low only counted incidents where a person was actually shot and it was ruled self defense, ignoring the vast majority of cases where the gun isn't fired. Other swing too far the other way.

This series of articles does a good job of future discussing the problem of quantifying defensive gun uses.

http://m.dailykos.com/story/2013/9/17/1238623/-Defensive-Gun-Use-The-CDC-Report-on-Gun-Violence

I can tell you from my time as a Sheriff's deputy I saw more defensive uses of firearms than I saw misuse. But that was one rural southern county and you can't extrapolate that to the nation as a whole.