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Facts about firearms.***ANTI GUN PEOPLE PLEASE READ!***
* Based on survey data from the U.S. Department of Justice, roughly 5,340,000 violent crimes were committed in the United States during 2008. These include simple/aggravated assaults, robberies, sexual assaults, rapes, and murders. Of these, about 436,000 or 8% were committed by offenders visibly armed with a gun.
* Based on survey data from a 2000 study published in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology, U.S. civilians use guns to defend themselves and others from crime at least 989,883 times per year.
* A 1993 nationwide survey of 4,977 households found that over the previous five years, at least 0.5% of households had members who had used a gun for defense during a situation in which they thought someone “almost certainly would have been killed” if they “had not used a gun for protection.” Applied to the U.S. population, this amounts to 162,000 such incidents per year. This figure excludes all “military service, police work, or work as a security guard.”
* A 1982 survey of male felons in 11 state prisons dispersed across the U.S. found:
• 34% had been scared off, shot at, wounded, or captured by an armed victim
• 40% decided not to commit a crime because they “knew or believed that the
victim was carrying a gun”.
• 69% personally knew other criminals who had been “scared off, shot at wounded, or captured by an armed victim”
* In the 10-year period from November 30, 1998 to December 31, 2008, about 96 million background checks for gun purchases were processed through the federal background check system. Of these, approximately 681,000 or about 1% were denied.
* In 2007, there were 613 fatal firearm accidents in the United States, constituting 0.5% of 123,706 fatal accidents that year.
* In 2007, there were roughly 15,698 emergency room visits for non-fatal firearm accidents, constituting 0.05% of 27.7 million emergency room visits for non-fatal accidents that year.
