edit- follow up question
“a well regulated militia”. since the amendment was passed, and since the US has a military, has there even been a militia? would you trust your random neighbours loading up and marching against something? or would you expect law enforcement to crush it?
seems like the amendment has become “the locals can have guns and murder each other”. Nothing to with a “militia”; or defending your country.
You’re correct that it has nothing to do with militia anymore.
It’s because the Supreme Court ruled that it has nothing to do with militia and everything to do with letting everybody have whatever guns they want.
That’s a relatively modern viewpoint. It’s the result of huge amounts of money being spent to campaign in favor of letting anybody have all the guns they want.
As a result, the United States has more gun violence and more gun murders than pretty much any other developed country. It’s not even close.
This is the correct answer.
Cf. D.C. v. Heller (2008)
What are the statistics for people successfully using a gun to actually defend themselves? I never see them mentioned. I’m genuinely curious, because from where I’m sitting, they seem to cause more problems than they ever solve.
Incredibly small compared to the amount of gun violence. Where you are sitting has a pretty accurate view
Well… 30,000, 60,000 or 2 million a year depending on source… So… clearly it’s easy to measure and everyone agrees. Vs 15k-ish homicides. I won’t include a million sources but here’s one for the low end and one for the homicide number. Also, an interesting “non-partisan” article with strong sources that discusses the issue.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11540955/
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/04/28/what-the-data-says-about-gun-deaths-in-the-us/
https://www.thetrace.org/2022/06/defensive-gun-use-data-good-guys-with-guns/
Interesting stuff. Thanks. It seems the biggest problem is that it isn’t something being tracked with any kind of consistency or accuracy, which is what I suspected. I’m not sure it’s something that’s even possible to accurately track. Just showing someone you have a gun that deters them from committing a crime isn’t likely to be reported, for example.
The agreement seems to be that it’s still a lot less that using a gun as the aggressor, though. The stats on suicide by guns is pretty horrifying, too.
All up, I prefer living in a country with strong gun regulations and very few guns.
I imagine defining what counts as “self defense” is difficult. A lot of the gun violence is justified as “self defence” (whether that is accurate is a different story), whether it’s trying protecting family/friends, your property, or yourself. It’s a lot easier to come up with a statistic of how many people got shot by a gun.
And you are correct that more guns is correlated with more gun-related violence, there are plenty of studies on this for many different parts of the world. When I was in middle school, we learned about this in geography class, with data points in Australia, the US, China, and various countries in Europe, and there was a very strong relationship between number of guns and the cases of gun violence!