Earlier this year, President Obama signed a set of executive orders targeting gun violence in the wake of the Sandy Hook shootings. Among them was an edict commanding the CDC to do a comprehensive survey of studies regarding guns and gun violence in the United States. Clearly, once the CDC produced the hard evidence that the US was a violent nation of wild-west shootouts, the American people would be eager to approve and fund future research while embracing strict gun control legislation.
At least that was the plan. The study, which was compiled by the Institute of Medicine and National Research Council under the CDC's direction, was recently completed and released. The anti-gun crowd has been awfully quiet about it. Could it be that it didn't support their bogus hypothesis?
In a word, Yes. The CDC's numbers basically back every pro-gun rights argument made over the course of the last year.
First and foremost, the majority of annual gun-related deaths are due to suicide, not crime.
The study finds that "Between the years 2000-2010 firearm-related suicides significantly outnumbered homicides for all age groups, annually accounting for 61 percent of the more than 335,600 people who died from firearms related violence in the United States.”
snip
The CDC report finds that "Defensive use of guns by crime victims is a common occurrence." In fact, while exact statistics are hard to come by, the report indicates that "Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year, in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008."
So, there's as much as a 10 to 1 ratio of defensive firearm use vs. offensive use, though admittedly the 3 million figure is probably a bit high.
The rest here: http://www.caintv.com/obama-orders-cdc-gun-violence
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