In 2013, the New York Times cited a study by the Violence Policy Center in a piece countering wildly inflated claims by the N.R.A. that guns were used self-defensively millions of times a year:
The V.P.C. also found that in 2010 "there were only 230 justifiable homicides involving a private citizen using a firearm" reported to the F.B.I.'s Uniform Crime Reporting Program. Compare that with the number of criminal gun homicides in the same year: 8,275. (That's not counting gun suicides or unintentional shootings.) Or compare it with the number of Americans killed by guns since Newtown: 3,458.
The V.P.C. study is exhaustive and well worth reading, but these passages stood out to me:
According to the NCVS, (National Crime Victimization Survey) looking at the total number of self-protective behaviors undertaken by victims of attempted or completed property crime for the five-year period 2007 through 2011, in only 0.1 percent of these instances had the intended victim acted in resistance to a criminal who "threatened or attacked with a firearm."
In 2010, for every justifiable homicide in the United States involving a gun, guns were used in 36 criminal homicides. And this ratio, of course, does not take into account the thousands of lives ended in gun suicides (19,392) or unintentional shootings (606) that year.
I personally think the claims of "justifiable homicide" are still inflated, but the study goes out of its way to cite objective sources, and for the purposes of this piece, I am prepared to give the pro-gun side maximum leeway.
Let's multiply by 10 the instances in which the victim of a crime was confronted by someone "threatened or attacked by a firearm." This means that the favored scenario of the N.R.A. (a "good guy with a gun" stopping "a bad guy with a gun") would still apply in just 1% (0.1 x 10) of the times a gun kills or wounds another person. The rate for homicides only is slightly more generous, 1 out of 36. In the interest of bending over backwards to the self-defense crowd, let's round up justifiable shootings to 3% of the overall total.
The terms "justifiable" means that we can infer that in these 3 out of every 100 times, a shooter would not regret having shot his weapon, as he would ostensibly feel he might otherwise have himself been hurt or killed. So what of the other 97% of shootings? How does the gun owner feel about having pulled the trigger, or having his gun being used by someone else for whatever reason?
I cannot find a study in which this question was systematically asked, but it doesn't take a trained sociologist to make a few educated guesses at the answers. Certainly, no one convicted of murder and sitting in prison would choose to re-commit that murder, if only because they were caught and punished for it. One would also, no doubt, be very hard-pressed to find anyone who shot a friend or a stranger while under the influence of alcohol or drugs who would choose do it over again. Unquestionably, the vast majority of homicides against family members resulting from a moment of passion or temporary insanity are regretted; likewise when the result is "mere" injury. And of course, all accidents are by definition unwanted, none more so than those in which the victim or perpetrator is a child - a frighteningly common occurrence.
The gun rights lobby frames even the delay of a few days in the ability of a "law-abiding citizen" to buy a firearm as some kind of intolerable burden on personal liberty. They place the right to bear arms on the same level as freedom of the press, assembly, speech, and religion. And yet it would be inconceivable to find even a tiny percentage of those who have written an article, protested at a demonstration, or gone to church wishing they had not done so.
There is a huge chasm between the fantasy and the reality of weapons' use in the United States. The fervent N.R.A member seems to honestly believe that any day now he will need to do one or all of the following: a) shoot an armed intruder; b) overthrow a tyrannical government; c) defend himself or others against a mugger or a terrorist; d) protect his family and property in an apocalyptic scenario in which urban hordes are coming to steal his food and shelter. The fact that these events never come to pass is secondary to the emotional truth that really drives him: owning firearms makes him "feel" safer. The price we all pay for this delusion is a country far more unsafe that any other developed nation by extraordinary margins.
The sad irony is that those who finally do use their gun for the purpose for which it was designed - to kill or wound another human being - overwhelmingly wish afterwards that the gun had never gone off. This is the final and bitter twist. Gun-lovers are fighting tooth and nail for a right the vast majority of them would regret actually exercising.