[tshaddox]

How often do people use guns to defend themselves against violent crime, and how often do people kill themselves or others with guns (accidentally or intentionally)?

[zmgsabst]

Defensive uses:

500,000-3,000,000

Suicides:

24,000

Murders:

14,000

- - - - -

Defensive gun uses:

https://datavisualizations.heritage.org/firearms/defensive-g...

Suicide and murder:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_S...

[gbhn]

There are roughly a million violent crimes a year. It is not credible there are 3x as many defensive uses of firearms that are somehow being missed.

The page you reference indexes a few thousand over several years. Seems likely an undercount as the page claims but not by that much by probably a couple orders of magnitude.

[jka]

As far as I can tell, the 500k-3m figure is from an unpublished[1] report that was commissioned by the CDC - further validation could be helpful.

There is also separate disputation of the figure in a report[2] by Harvard's Injury Control Research Center.

[1] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/01/16/the-s...

[2] - https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/gun-thr...

[epicureanideal]

> There are roughly a million violent crimes a year

Source? Seems low.

[zmgsabst]

Those numbers are (roughly) in line with FBI statistics, from 500,000 to 1,500,000 depending on if you include assaults.

https://www.ojjdp.gov/ojstatbb/crime/ucr.asp?table_in=2

[zmgsabst]

Sure — I’m willing to believe a lower number; that was just what I found.

[seoaeu]

Your first link shows 2400 documented cases since 2019 which is more than I’d have expected. But clicking through those examples… many honestly don’t seem that sympathetic. Stuff like “shootout between X and Y, but Y shot second so it was self defense”. Or “X fatally shot Y with no witnesses to contradict his self defense claim”.