{"id":77251,"date":"2022-02-10T14:08:41","date_gmt":"2022-02-10T20:08:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=77251"},"modified":"2022-02-10T14:08:41","modified_gmt":"2022-02-10T20:08:41","slug":"77251","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=77251","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Letters to the Editor: You don\u2019t have to shoot someone to use a gun defensively<\/a><\/p>\n

To the editor:<\/b>\u00a0Dr. Steven J. Sainsbury pushes the absurd claim there are only 2,000 defensive gun uses per year. (\u201cThinking of buying a gun for self-defense? Don\u2019t do it<\/a>,\u201d Opinion, Jan. 31)<\/p>\n

The claim overwhelmingly relies on counting defensive gun uses reported in news articles, but that is a dramatic undercount because the vast majority of successful self-defense cases don\u2019t make the news. Ninety-five percent of defensive gun uses involve merely brandishing a gun, and less than 1% involve the attacker being killed or wounded.<\/p>\n

But most news stories only report on cases where attackers are killed and brandishings are ignored.<\/p>\n

Seventeen national surveys find an average of 2 million defensive gun uses per year. The U.S. Department of Justice\u2019s National Crime Victimization Survey puts it at around 100,000. Both show the 2,000 claim to be ridiculous.<\/p>\n

Finally, the article labels me as a \u201cgun rights advocate,\u201d not a researcher who has held academic positions at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Chicago, Stanford and Yale. I have also been a senior advisor for research at the U.S. Department of Justice.<\/p>\n

John R. Lott Jr., Missoula, Mt.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Letters to the Editor: You don\u2019t have to shoot someone to use a gun defensively To the editor:\u00a0Dr. Steven J. Sainsbury pushes the absurd claim there are only 2,000 defensive gun uses per year. (\u201cThinking of buying a gun for self-defense? Don\u2019t do it,\u201d Opinion, Jan. 31) The claim overwhelmingly relies on counting defensive gun … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,8,29,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-77251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-letters-to-the-editor","category-rkba","category-safety","category-self-defense"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77251","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=77251"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77251\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":77252,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77251\/revisions\/77252"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=77251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=77251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=77251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}