Libs Talk Gun Deaths But Won't Dare Say How Many Lives Guns Save; It's Staggering
It’s the number that matters the most, so it’s the one liberals ignore.
In the aftermath of any outrageous gun crime – a high school in Florida, a concert in Las Vegas, a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas – the mainstream media parades victims’ families in front of the cameras, giving national platforms to just about anyone with a word to say about what they call “gun violence,” as long as it’s in favor of more gun control.
But what they don’t talk about is the number of people – living, breathing Americans – whose lives have been saved because they had access to the means of self-defense they needed.
And as conservative commentator Larry Elder pointed out in a piece published this week by FrontPage, the number is staggering.
Elder is no stranger to controversy. After the clash in Charlottesville, Virginia, last summer that left one woman dead, he was one of the few black intellectuals with the courage to point out the biggest problems facing the black population of America had a lot less to do with white racism than they did the behavior of individual blacks – and backed it up with logic and facts instead of emotion and indignation.
In his gun control piece, he takes the same approach – and the impact is startling.
One report Elder cited, published by the National Academies Press and partly funded by the Centers for Disease Control, found up to 3 million Americans had used a firearm to defend themselves in the study year of 2008.
“Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year, in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008.”
That isn’t meant to suggest that up to 3 million gun-users avoided being murdered in 2008, but they did defend themselves from being victimized. That’s no small thing, and it’s definitely not something the gun control activists ever want Americans to notice.
A second study Elder cited was more specific – and even if the numbers are lower, they’re no less impressive. The 1992 work by economist and gun rights activist John Lott, with research associate David Mustard reached a straightforward conclusion:
“We find that allowing citizens to carry concealed weapons deters violent crimes and it appears to produce no increase in accidental deaths,” Lott and Mustard wrote in the study’s abstract. “If those states which did not have right-to-carry concealed gun provisions had adopted them in 1992, approximately 1,570 murders; 4,177 rapes; and over 60,000 aggravated assaults would have been avoided yearly.”
Think about that for a second: 1,570 murders; 4,177 rapes annually.
If the estimate is even close to right, that comes to more than 39,000 lives that could have been saved in the 25 years since the study was published. And at least 100,000 women could have been spared the life-changing violence of rape.
Gun grabbers understand the power of emotion – that’s why they spent disgraceful weeks pimping out the children of Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School to tearfully lecture the rest of the country on the need to “do something” about guns in America.
What they don’t want the rest of America to understand, though, is that the only thing that prevents guns in the wrong hands from being used to victimize the innocent – men, women or children – is a gun in the right hands.
Lott’s number proves it. The CDC -funded study number proves it.
And the number of Americans who carry firearms to defend themselves and others prove it every day.
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