re: #210 Rightwingconspirator

I was trying to be lighthearted, as in you can get lots of numbers (Lotts?) just can’t get good reliable numbers.

The absence of that number is a great disadvantage to fair discussion about self defense and guns.

Not really. It isn’t a necessary number, as I said. National numbers have no relevance to individual situations, and once you drilled down to the level of the actual situation—where the person lived and worked—the data would be too shallow anyway.

What we do have is relatively solid numbers on violent crimes. Most people, unfortunately, are wildly misinformed about this, so we get a lot of people buying guns for ‘self defense’ based on a very incorrect assumption about their risk. It’s too bad, and people who are experts on guns should be doing what they can to educate these people about their actual risks.