Thanks for reposting that … let me comment on that:
@Guerrilla:
Guns are used 6,580(resistance to crime: the prevealance and nature of Self-Defense with a Gun #86 “the Journal of Criminal Law” Northwestern Univ. of Law) times a DAY to defend themselves (me brings up handy computer calculator…) if we times that be 300 (just for a conservative rate we get: 2,055,000 lives saved every year!..)
ahem first, your math is wrong: you put in 6850 *300. Your given number of 6580 * 300 would be 1974000 crimes prevented.
The thing i critize about that: I ask for lives saved, you say crimes prevented. Noone is hurt if someone steals from you, noone dies if you get beaten up (lightly). Still, these are crimes which probably show up in the statistics.
Thus, i don’t agree at all that your estimate was conservative…. unless you meant it the political way ;)
Another point: if all these self-defense were against “attacks against your life”, and i just assume that the US society is otherwise a “usual” western society and that Germany is a “usual” western society… then we in Germany would have (82 million germans, compared to 278 million USies, assuming the ratio holds) an approximated 582,000 deaths that were not prevented by guns (as we don’t have guns). In 2000 we had about 735,000 people that died in Germany. So, that would mean that about 80% of all people in germany die due to violent crimes.
This is unbelievable.
Thus, one of the assumptions has to be wrong:
Either you are an extremely violent country and thus “unusal”,
or germany is an extremely peacful country and thus “unusual”,
or the crimes that were prevented would have been non-lethal to a huge degree.
I tend to the third reason