Did guns or vaccines save more lives in 2021?

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

True Gary is a gun nut whose research can't be trusted.

I thought that Gary Kleck was one of the most influential criminologists of all time. He is also famous for his arguments against death penalty.

I’ve done a bit of reading, both on Kleck’s work and various critiques of it. Couple of issues:

-Kleck very broadly  defines ‘gun defense’. For example, he counts house signs indicating the residents have guns as defense, whether or not the guns are used or even exist.

-He arrives at the 300k figure by extrapolating from a sample size of just 5 000 out of a country with a population of well over 300 million.

-It seems difficult to determine, in any particular gun encounter, whether or not the presence of a gun was a factor in life saving.

-Even if we’re being generous beyond all reason and posit that guns were brandished often enough to save 300 000 lives, this means gun use produces a higher mortality than automobile crashes, breast cancer, and heart disease.

Boru