No. of Recommendations: 9
A DGU doesn't require a gun to be fired.
It's not about whether the gun is fired.
The people who are responding to these surveys are reporting being exposed to crimes at rates that are far, far, FAR too high to be realistic. They're claiming that their DGU events - whether the gun is fired or not - were reported to the police as attempted crime far, far, FAR more often than actual police reports show. And as the Politico piece noted, even the original study author - Kleck - estimated that about half of the "DGU's" were actually illegal uses of the firearm. Those DGU's weren't crimes prevented, but crimes committed - the use of a deadly weapon to harass or intimidate a completely innocent person who wasn't about to commit a crime.
These surveys are fiction, BHM. People overstate their DGU, either inadvertently or intentionally misreporting their actual experience - for the same reasons that make other "survey" analyses of social phenomena unreliable. People who own guns want to think they're useful (social desirability bias). They want other people to think they're useful (strategic response bias). They're more likely to misremember things that happened outside the survey timeframe as happening more recently (time telescoping bias). And again, about half the DGU's they report are crimes committed, not crimes averted.
And speaking for myself my guns have never threatened me but I am leery of my toaster.
That's an attempt at humor, but your guns can destroy your life in a way that your toaster cannot. If you make a mistake with your guns and use them to injure or kill an innocent person, the harm will be incalculable. At best you have years and years of legal bills and the guilt of having wrongfully hurt another person; but the worst case scenario is that you spend the rest of your life in jail. And of course, if you ever succumb to depression or suicidal ideation, you're far more likely to kill yourself with a gun than a toaster.
You should be leery of your guns. Unlike your toaster, they're the most dangerous thing in your house to you. Unless you have a particularly unusual geographic or demographic situation, they probably increase the danger to you more than they reduce the danger from crime to you. If you continue to believe - falsely - that guns are frequently used to prevent crime, you won't be able to make a rational assessment of whether they're worth having.
