No. of Recommendations: 13
Offset by the number of crimes that were prevented by the 2 million plus defensive gun uses each year.
There aren't two million plus defensive gun uses each year.
As we've discussed in the past, that figure can't possibly be accurate. There just isn't enough crime for that to be happening. Given the number of gun owners, they would have to be experiencing rates of attempted crime that are well more than an order of magnitude higher than everyone else. That can't possibly be happening. Instead, the ridiculously high rate is an artifact of the methodology of the one study that produced that number - just asking people to self-report their history, often years after the events in question.
That means two things. First, some (probably very many) of these events didn't really happen - or didn't happen when the respondents think they happened, as people misremember whether a scary incident happened within the last year or longer ago.
Second - and perhaps more importantly - it means that some (probably very many) of these events weren't actually in response to an attempted crime. They were people using their guns (mostly by displaying them, but sometimes by firing them) against innocent people. Remember the spate of shootings against innocent people a short time ago? People engaging in "defensive gun use" by shooting innocent folks who knocked on the wrong door, or turned into the wrong driveway, or mistakenly went to the wrong parked car? We know about them because they resulted in criminal charges against the shooters - but had they not had such tragic outcomes, they might have just been considered "DGU" incidents by the gun owners.
And that's the thing. When that happens, these "defensive gun uses" aren't preventing a crime. They're just people using their guns to scare innocent people who haven't done anything wrong. And in many contexts, doing that is itself a crime. If you see someone walking down the street when you're alone at night, and you intentionally brandish your firearm so that they cross the street to avoid you, that's not actually a defensive gun use - you're committing assault with a deadly weapon.
Given that, I strongly suspect that the "two million defensive gun uses" represent more crimes being committed than actually prevented. It's lots and lots of gun owners using their weapons to scare people that haven't done anything wrong. The gun owners know, at some level, that it's wrong to use a lethal weapon to scare someone who's innocent - so they convince themselves (either in the moment or after the fact) that the person had in fact done something to merit the use of a deadly weapon to frighten them. Just boatloads of criminal assault with a deadly weapon, rationalized as defensive actions.
