[vacri]

It's also a classic case of selective reporting - you want to include all these invisible cases of defensive gun uses that don't get reported, but you're not mentioning criminal uses of firearms - muggings, holdups, gang activity. If you hold up a store with a gun, it doesn't necessarily follow that you must kill someone, so that stat doesn't get much press - in exactly the same way that defensive gun use doesn't get much press. Well... accurate press. It gets plenty of emotive press.

As for looking for such a statistic, you can start with Kleck in the early 90s, but you should also read criticisms of his - it was a shoddy piece of work with a wide number of fundamental flaws, but it was heavily used by gun advocates at the time. It put 'defensive gun uses' at 2.5M/year and 'lives saved' at 200k/year. The latter number has absolutely no realistic merit when compared against contemporary countries (it would mean that without guns the US murder rate would rise from 4.2 to ~50. For comparison, the current highest homicide rate of any first-world, industrialised nation is 4.2 (which itself is currently triple its contemporaries), and only four countries in the entire world have a rate higher than 50.

Hopefully the above paragraph would help suggest why saying 100k lives saved/year is also extremely unlikely. At 100k you're looking at a murder rate of about 25. Mexico with all its poverty, social troubles, and drug wars only manages 17. Does anyone honestly think that the social fabric of the US is so abysmally weak as to collapse that badly in the event of gun reform?