Like approximately 30,000 other interested people, I read The Truth About Guns every day. I find it to be the single greatest source of information on gun rights and gun control issues, bar none. Recently the readership has topped 1 million unique visitors per month, which breaks down to over 30,000 a day.
Regular commenters must number about 100, maybe more, and one of their favorite topics is DGUs, defensive gun uses. They have a lot at stake in pushing the exaggerated and inflated estimates of how many DGUs there are each year. The most popular and most frequently repeated is the famous 2.5 million which Professors Kleck and Gertz came up with some years ago. If this were true, gun control folks would be hard pressed to compete. Fortunately, many people in many ways have debunked this ridiculous claim, my favorite is The Propaganda Professor's.
Here's another one. If there are 100 million gun owners and 2.5 million DGUs per year, the percentage of gun owners who use their gun defensively each year is 2.5%. Agreed?
If there are 30,000 unique daily readers of TTAG and 2.5% of them have personal defensive gun uses each year, we should see 750 first-hand reports each year.
I have seen none, not one single first hand report of a defensive gun use by a TTAG reader. Of course it's possible that I missed one or even ten, but there should have been 750, that's more then 2 each day.
Before anyone gets upset about my slanting the numbers, let's do this. Even many gun-rights fanatics admit the 2.5 million figure is too high. They often say a million or so. That would bring the 750 down to 300. And let's say there may be readers who are too shy to share their experience on the internet. I find that hard to believe but let's go wild and say HALF of the folks who have saved lives with their guns and read TTAG every day chose to keep it to themselves. Now we're down to 150.
I repeat, I have seen none.
The explanation is obvious. Estimates that put the true figure of DGU down around 1,000 per year make for a percentage that looks like this: 0.00001%. When you apply that percentage to the 30,000 TTAG readers it's easy to see why we don't regularly see reports of defensive gun use.
What's your opinion? Please leave a comment.
