Typical propaganda from the anti-gun crowd. Rather than debate the facts they elect to appeal to emotions trying to invoke some kind of hysteria. Owning a gun is part of our country's heritage. I own several guns and I carry a concealed firearm every time I leave the house. But you know what? My guns must be defective by the standards of the anti-gun crowd because they have not killed anyone yet.
H.R. 17, Citizen’s Self-Defense Act of 2009, introduced by Rep. Roscoe Bartlett of Maryland, states that: “Every year more than 2,400,000 people in the United States use a gun to defend themselves against criminals – or more than 6,500 people a day. This means that, each year, firearms are used 60 times more often to protect the lives of honest citizens than to take lives. Of the 2,400,000 self-defense cases, more than 192,000 are by women defending themselves against sexual abuse. Of the 2,400,000 times citizens use their guns to defend themselves every year, 92 percent merely brandish their gun or fire a warning shot to scare off their attackers. Less than 8 percent of the time, does a citizen kill or wound his or her attacker.â€
When Florida enacted the pioneering “shall issue†right to carry law in 1987 the media predicted wild-west type shootouts in the streets and that the “ordinary†people of the state would not be able to control themselves. Over the next five years Florida’s homicide rate fell by 23 percent.
Just so that you will know, for the average citizen to obtain a concealed carry permit, he or she must: Have no felony convictions; have never been convicted of domestic violence; have no history of mental illness; have passed a background check and have fingerprints on file with the authorities; and have passed mandatory training both in the use of a firearm and the applicable law.
Finally, a 16 year comprehensive study on concealed carry laws by University of Chicago law professor John Lott, with graduate student David Mustard, shows us even more interesting facts. Whenever concealed carry laws went into effect in a county during this 16 year period, murders fell by 8.5%, rapes by 5%, and aggravated assaults by 7%. If, in 1992, all states had enacted "shall issue" laws, murders in the United States would have decreased by 1,570. There would have been 4,177 fewer rapes and over 60,000 fewer aggravated assaults. This unequivocally supports the wisdom of our Founding Fathers who guaranteed that our right to keep and bear arms "shall not be infringed".
To quote Lott: "Our study is the first to provide direct empirical evidence of the Brady Law's effect on crime rates - and we found just the opposite (of the intended) result: The law's implementation is associated with more aggravated assaults and rapes."