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

[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.