People will always abuse their rights, some will anyway. When they do, they get punished. That's no rationale to abolish our rights. You wouldn't abolish free speech because someone invited a riot, or abolish freedom of religion because a religious group was performing human sacrifices. Same with gun ownership, because it isn't harmful to anyone.
"BLAMING THE VICTIM" This is just more skewed junk science we've come to expect from Hemenway and his cloistered Harvard eggheads who have no real life experience with the true criminal element for which they show so much concern.. As someone who has had to deal with 3 DGUs, I wasn't overly concerned with jaywalking while my life was on the line but in the mindset of Hemenway and his gaggle of cloistered dilettantes, I'm the criminal, not the career thugs who murder, rape and plunder with impunity. I can promise you that Hemenway and his collection of Federally protected judges would not be overly concerned with all the legal niceties if they were suddenly accosted by 4 armed thugs with malicious intent.
The largest and most comprehensive survey of American gun owners ever conducted suggests that they use firearms in self-defense about 1.7 million times a year. Lets assume this is off by an order of magnitude, and there are only 170,000 defensive gun uses per year. That's >16x more often than a gun is used to commit murder That's >7x more often than a gun is used to commit suicide. If defensive gun us is "rare", how then shall we describe the frequency with which a firearm is used to take a life?
Its not subjective: Per se trespassing is an OFFENSE you commit against my property and person. Coyotes are by definition nuisance predators able to be shot on sight on your property because THEY KILL AND EAT CHATTELS and human babies occasionally.
There's good reason to doubt that most claimed DGUs are in fact DGUs, but that means nothing to you? Noted.
Still no evidence to support the claim that "they counted a gun in the house as one the intruder had broken in with". Noted.
Why do gun apologists want to measure defensive gun uses with surveys but not criminal gun uses? Why the inconsistency? Probably because more people would report being a victim of a gun crime than using a gun in self defense in a survey. "Using data from a national random-digit-dial telephone survey conducted under the direction of the Harvard Injury Control Center, we examined the extent and nature of offensive gun use. We found that firearms are used far more often to frighten and intimidate than they are used in self-defense." https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/gun-threats-and-self-defense-gun-use-2/
Predictably, you avoided the question. I'll ask again: If defensive gun us is "rare", how then shall we describe the frequency with which a firearm is used to take a life? Well?
Still no evidence to support the claim that "There's good reason to doubt that most claimed DGUs are in fact DGUs," Noted.
"most" "may be" isn't the definition of a good reason to believe that most are not good DGUs. Pay attention to what you're being told. "Most" "may be" also allows for "most DGUs are good DGUs".
why do gun banners start with the premise that guns need to be banned and then work backwards to create bullshit "studies" that justify their garbage?
That's easy. You only use "findings" that validate your desired conclusion. That's why they call them "findings" because you go out and "find" cherry picked nonsense that confirms your anti gun bias. Oh, don't forget to rely heavily on emotions to support your desired conclusion: "If it only saves one child, it's worth disarming all law abiding citizens". Beware of crack pots that say the same thing about lowering all speed limits to 10 mph. Anything else I can help you with?
So your underwhelming point is merely that showing that something is doubtful still leaves open the possibility that it's true. Noted.
You did not "show" anything to be doubtful - you made a claim to that effect, and you refuse to support said claim.
https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/tpfv9318.pdf "The relative frequency of offensive and defensive gun uses: results from a national survey" https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11200101/
And here is yet another great example of my point... Tuesday night I was at a friend's house and a somewhat residential area and heard an idiot in a car taking the corner way too fast.... We heard rubber squealing about five blocks down but it was too far away to see. A few minutes later a guy that knows my friend drove up that same road and asked us if we had seen that car because it just hit his house. And then the driver took off and hauled ass. I cannot imagine that he got too far because they had to have a busted radiator at the very least. The thought of getting shot never once crossed my mind that night. But having ridden a bicycle most of my life and now recently a motorcycle the thing that scares me the most are idiots behind the wheel