Guns in America: For every criminal killed in self-defense, 34 innocent people die

[beardown]

68. I thought that it was about the 'innocents'

It's not how many bad guys are killed, but how many good guys aren't. Why even mention 'innocent' in the subject line if it's not a key part of the posting? We have to assume that the 300 gun incidents prevented violence to some innocent parties.

Do you think a more thought provoking metric would have been 1,000 innocent guns owners prevented their own death-injury by the use, lethal or otherwise, of a gun? Then we could debate are saving those 1,000 innocent lives worth the 30,000 other innocent deaths. Then the debate would swing to it's next metric of how to weigh the suicides and crook on crook deaths, etc, but with a new counter weight, ie, the 1,000 saved innocent gun users. Of course, the 1,000 figure would bring a whole new point of contention into the discussion.

Now that would have been interesting, but just saying firearms are present doesn't really lead to any meaningful analysis or discussion as that position doesn't seem to differentiate between a woman shooting a home invader coming at her with an axe and a gang banger shooting a rival gang banger. Perhaps this is a key difference between some of the opposing positions between pro and anti gun folks?