What would be the number?

[needledriver]

25. I am not a statistician

So I may have misunderstood common statistical practice.

I came up with the 35,000 number as a rounded figure of what I remember from the last time I looked at the VPC numbers. As I stated in post #7, when I looked again at the VPC paper on the subject I see that during the five-year period 2007 - 2011, only 235,700 of the self-protective behaviors involved a firearm. 235,700 divided by 5 is 47,140, which I rounded up to 50,000 to simplify the math.

The rest of the VPC quote citing the 235,700 figure is:

"Of this number, it is not known what type of firearm was used or whether it was fired or not. The number may also include off duty law enforcement officers who use their firearms in self-defense."

As I said, I am not a statistician, but it seems to me that you would muddy your outcome if you included the set of unsuccessful defensive gun uses (i.e homicides) within the set of all defensive gun uses without explicitly stating so on your results. Even so, if we subtract the number of unsuccessful defensive gun uses from the total of all defensive gun uses, we still end up with more people alive because they defended themselves with firearms than dead because they tried and failed.

Let's take the 47,140 average defensive gun uses per year and the homicide total for 2013 and see how that would work out. Total homicides by firearm: 11,208. Total deaths by discharge of firearm with undetermined intent, 281. That is 11,489 which could conceivably have been the result of an unsuccessful defensive firearm use. There is no way to determine if every one of these deaths by firearm was the result of an unsuccessful defensive gun use. It is likely that a good many of these people were shot and had no firearm to defend themselves with. Even so, I will take the extreme case that every one of these deaths occurred in an unsuccessful defensive gun use situation. 47,140 minus 11,489 is 35,651.

That means, even with taking the worst case scenario and assuming that every firearms death of 2013 occurred in an unsuccessful defensive gun use, 35,651 people engaged in a successful defensive gun use. So I put it to you again; How many additional deaths per year of people unable to defend themselves would you be willing to accept as the price for getting rid of the people's right to keep and bear arms?