And So It Begins: the Begining of the End for the Second Amendment.

[Crazed Rabbit]

I would also like to add that it would be appropriate style and common courtesy in debates not to just throw some numbers around but to provide a source for these numbers, so that anybody who is intersted would be able to see

Here ya go:
(EDIT: this is the site for the 2.5million defensive gun uses-DGUs)
http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcdguse.html

Here's something about the murder rate in Washington DC, which has climbed 134% in the last 30 years (after banning guns), while the murder rate has dropped in the rest of the nation.

http://www.ncpa.org/pub/st/st176/s176c.html

Here's another on how resisting armed robbery with a gun is the safest (ie. least likely way to get injured) way-bar none.

http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa109.html

The important bit (thought the site also has many other reasons why gun control is bad):

Gun control advocates like to cite a recent article in the New Enqland Journal of Medicine that argues that for every intruder killed by a gun, 43 other people die as a result of gunshot wounds incurred in the home.[43] (Again, most of them are suicides; many of the rest are assaultive family members killed in legitimate self-defense.) However, counting the number of criminal deaths is a bizarre method of measuring anticrime utility; no one evaluates police efficacy by tallying the number of criminals killed. Defensive use of a gun is far more likely to involve scaring away an attacker by brandishing the gun, or by firing it without causing death. Even if the numbers of criminal deaths were the proper measure of anticrime efficacy, citizens acting with full legal justification kill at least 30 percent more criminals than do the police

Crazed Rabbit

[Adrian II]

Here ya go:
(EDIT: this is the site for the 2.5million defensive gun uses-DGUs)
http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcdguse.html

Right. It says not 2.5, but 2 million. And that number is the outcome of Gary Klecks research. His research does not compare defensive gun use to other defensive strategies, either individual or collective ones.

More importantly, the quote from Gary Kleck has the following conclusion:

The positive associations often found between aggregate levels of violence and gun ownership appear to be primarily due to violence increasing gun ownership, rather than the reverse. Gun availability does affect the rates of gun violence (e.g. the gun homicide rate, gun suicide rate, gun robbery rate) and the fraction of violent acts which involve guns (e.g. the percent of homicides, suicides or robberies committed with guns); it just does not affect total rates of violence (total homicide rate, total suicide rate, total robbery rate, etc.).

In other words, the availability of guns turns non-gun crimes into gun crimes, that is all. The net effect of increasing or diminishing gun possession on the crime rate would be zero.

Violence increases gun ownership, not the reverse. Which leaves the extraordinary violence in American society to be explained. And that, as I said above, is the issue that interests me most.