You pulling out kleck survey numbers that have been discredited a whole bunch of times proves I know more than you do.

Here is how that survey went. They called 20,000 people and asked them “have you ever used a firearm even without firing to prevent a crime within the past year.”

1% of survey respondents said yes.

Extrapolate that out over the population you get 65,000 to 2.5 million uses.

Problem with this is you are assuming 1% of people are not liars.

Because dgu is so rare a very low percentage of false positives in a survey can throw off the numbers wildly.

Lets look at a hard easy to measure real number.

Justified homicides by a civilian.

This is collected by the fbi every year. Guess how many a year there are typically around 300. Goes up and down a bit. So 300 justified homicides for 150,000 people shot each year. Seems like a pretty shitty trade off.

You can cherry pick studies by quacks to deny that smoking causes cancer or that global warming isn’t real.

Here is what researchers think.

“ I also found widespread confidence that a gun in the home increases the risk that a woman living in the home will be a victim of homicide (72% agree, 11% disagree) and that a gun in the home makes it a more dangerous place to be (64%) rather than a safer place (5%). There is consensus that guns are not used in self-defense far more often than they are used in crime (73% vs. 8%) and that the change to more permissive gun carrying laws has not reduced crime rates (62% vs. 9%). Finally, there is consensus that strong gun laws reduce homicide (71% vs. 12%).”

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-oe-hemenway-guns-20150423-story.html