Thread by @fawfulfan

I'm already seeing some on the right once again claiming that "the CDC" has proven that guns "save 2.5 million lives" per year.

So before we jump on that merry-go-round of bullshit, I'm going to debunk it again.

First, this 2.5 million number *doesn't* come from the CDC.

It comes from a 1992 survey by FSU criminologist Gary Kleck, who random-dialed a bunch of ppl, asked if they used a gun to defend themselves or their property in the last 4 years and extrapolated to the U.S. population.

There are a million problems with trying to measure defensive gun use this way.

First, there is no way to verify the respondents. Any of them could have fabricated an incident, named a real one that fell outside the 4 years, or even cast an aggressive gun use as a defensive one.

But even if we assume all the responses are real, Kleck included a bunch of gun uses that are PLAINLY not regular citizens fighting off crimes — he included police & soldiers who used their guns on duty, and even people who used guns to scare off animals. vacps.org/public-policy/…

So what's a better measure?

The National Crime Victimization Survey did its own study where it directly reviewed cases of property and violent crime attempts, and put the real number of defensive gun uses per year at 100,000. hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-t…

And keep in mind — the number of these crimes that would have ended in death had the victim not been armed is unknowable, but it's certainly a tiny fraction of that total 100,000. After all, homicides are only about 1.3% of all violent crimes per year. statista.com/topics/1750/vi…

If we assume prevented homicides are about that same percent within these incidents, then defensive gun use probably saves about 1,000-2,000 people a year.

Versus about 14,000 gun homicides and 24,000 gun suicides a year. cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/h… cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/s…

This tracks with the overwhelming body of research showing that people who own guns are more likely to be shot than people who don't — and that states with more gun ownership, all else equal, have higher rates of death. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P… vpc.org/press/states-w…

Ultimately, the gun lobby's denial of the public health crisis caused by their product is rife with all the same sleazy, pseudoscientific obfuscation the tobacco industry did to deny smoking causes lung cancer, or oil companies did to deny CO2 causes climate change.