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by gbhn 1485 days ago
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.

3 comments

As far as I can tell, the 500k-3m figure is from an unpublished[1] report that was commissioned by the CDC - further validation could be helpful.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

> There are roughly a million violent crimes a year

Source? Seems low.

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

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