Do ( D )s sell more guns than ( R )s?

[Yonadav]

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That's a very popular meme. But it is almost certainly not true. In most situations where an aggressor was stopped by a gun, the incident was never reported. An aggressor almost always retreats when confronted with a gun, and that's the end of the incident. No one bothers to report it.  I had 8 young men attempt to assault me in Portland OR while I was waiting for a bus at 1 AM. They were gay bashers. They were like, "You're going to die, faggot". I am not a gay man, but they thought that I was. They surrounded me and I pulled out my gun. They mouthed off for awhile, and then went away. I didn't fire a shot. They never landed a blow. There wasn't much to report. If I did report it, the cops might look for a reason to hassle me. But I probably would have had the crap stomped out of me that night if I hadn't had a gun. I might have been killed. Guns resolve situations frequently, and those situations don't get reported.

Um... Brian did say "in the home".  Your incident was not in the home.

If someone defended themselves with a gun against a stranger in their home, I'll wager that it's going to be reported most times, even if they didn't fire a shot -- because WTF was a stranger doing in their home ?   How did he get in?  What did he want?  Is he going to come back with friends or a gun of his own?

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that incidents involving break-ins or home invasion are going to get reported, regardless.

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For starters, it's pretty silly to restrict the statistics to 'in the home'. If we are going to talk stats about whether gun owners have saved or hurt by owning guns, then you have to look at the whole picture.

And I don't agree that people call the police every time that their gun caused an aggressor to retreat from their homes. Prospective assailants aren't always burglars who break in. Lot's of people have been told to leave at gunpoint, without the police ever becoming involved. That stuff never makes it into the stats.