[fjsolwmv]

You wildly misquote your source, which makes it hard to take your comment as good faith.

The source actually says:

> 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, in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008. > On the other hand, some scholars point to a radically lower estimate of only 108,000 annual defensive uses based on the National Crime Victimization Survey.

It is a huge leap to say that approximately every defensive use of a firearm prevented a death. It does not come anywhere close to passing the sniff test, as we don't see unarmed people dying of crime in the massive numbers implied by your misquote.

[ctrlc-root]

Did you keep reading?

> A different issue is whether defensive uses of guns, however numerous or rare they may be, are effective in preventing injury to the gun-wielding crime victim. Studies that directly assessed the effect of actual defensive uses of guns (i.e., incidents in which a gun was “used” by the crime victim in the sense of attacking or threatening an offender) have found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies.

I agree that it's not a definitive link, which is part of why I said we need more data, but the it's not non-existent either. I wish police departments would track and report this statistic like they do murders and suicides.