[worth]

Originally Posted by Fozzie_DeBear

So how come we NEVER hear about a multiple shooting being stopped by a civilian with a gun?

Oh wait a min..I has to be because not enough people have guns...I see.........

Not news? Not looking hard enough? I dunno, you tell me.

Well, the survey mostly generated results pretty consistent with those of a dozen previous surveys which generally indicates that defensive use of guns is pretty common and probably more common than criminal uses of guns. This survey went beyond previous ones in that it provided detail about how often people who had used a gun had done so. We asked people was the gun used defensively in the past five years and if so how many times did that happen and we asked details about what exactly happened. We nailed down that each use being reported was a bona fide defensive use against a human being in connection with a crime where there was an actual confrontation between victim and offender. Previous surveys were a little hazy on the details of exactly what was being reported as a defensive gun use. It wasn't, for example, clear that the respondents weren't reporting investigating a suspicious noise in their back yard with a gun where there was, in fact, nobody there. Our results ended up indicating, depending on which figures you prefer to use, anywhere from 800,000 on up to 2.4, 2.5 million defensive uses of guns against human beings -- not against animals -- by civilians each year.

About 8 percent of the defensive uses involved a sexual crime such as an attempted sexual assault. About 29 percent involved some sort of assault other than sexual assault. Thirty-three percent involved a burglary or some other theft at home. Twenty-two percent involved robbery. Sixteen percent involved trespassing. Note that some incidents could involve more than one crime.

Fifty-four percent of the defensive gun uses involved somebody verbally referring to the gun. Forty-seven percent involved the gun being pointed at the criminal. Twenty-two percent involved the gun being fired. Fourteen percent involved the gun being fired at somebody, meaning it wasn't just a warning shot; the defender was trying to shoot the criminal. Whether they succeeded or not is another matter but they were trying to shoot a criminal. And then in 8 percent they actually did wound or kill the offender.

We also asked whether the offender was armed. The offender was armed in 47.2 percent of the cases and they had a handgun in about 13.6 percent of all the cases and some other kind of gun in 4.5 percent of all the cases.

Armed with a knife: 18.1 percent, 2 percent with some other sharp object, 10.1 percent with a blunt object, and 6 percent with some other weapon. Keep in mind when adding this up that offenders could have had more than one weapon.

http://www.rense.com/general76/univ.htm

http://www.criminology.fsu.edu/p/faculty-gary-kleck.php

A national survey conducted in 1994 by the Police Foundation and sponsored by the National Institute of Justice almost exactly confirmed the estimates from the National Self-Defense Survey. This survey's person-based estimate was that 1.44% of the adult population had used a gun for protection against a person in the previous year, implying 2.73 million defensive gun users. These results were well within sampling error of the corresponding 1.33% and 2.55 million estimates produced by the National Self-Defense Survey.

http://www.pulpless.com/gunclock/kleck2.html