Woman uses gun to defend herself!

Yes, a woman used a gun to defend herself. A gun nut stated this on an Amazon.com forum triumphantly, as if that proved that everyone should be armed to the teeth. 

This was my response:


re: A civilian successfully uses a gun in self-defense.

In 2% of car crashes, the driver/passenger(s) would have been better off if they hadn't worn seat belts.

Therefore cars shouldn't have seat belts.

That is your reasoning.

I strongly recommend taking a free, online course in statistics before you pontificate on comment threads again.

Here's a good one--very entertaining, by one of the best online teachers, Salman Khan:

http://freevideolectures.com/Course/2564/Statistics

Oh, and the relevant stats here:
Lives saved by gun defense each year: around 200.
Lives lost by gun homicides each year: about 10,000.
Ratio of homicide (gun or otherwise) in the US vs. other rich countries: about 8 to 1. The level of violent crime is comparable--but ours are more likely to result in homicide due to this country being awash in guns.

Of course the gun industry lobbying organization, the NRA, put out scads of fake facts about all this.

FactCheck.org assessed them and found them self-serving and largely fact-free, to put it mildly.

Here's the link:

http://factcheck.org/2012/12/gun-rhetoric-vs-gun-facts/