Damn Plane, why do you keep perpetuating all these FACTS??
As ususal, dead on, if you don't mind the pun.
Here's some more of those damn facts, that echo what the thread started. According to research by Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck,
guns are used between 800,000 and 2.5 million times every year in self-defense.
A study by John Lott and David Mustard found that handguns appear to help women more than men. While murder rates drop when either sex carries more guns, the effect is especially pronounced when women carry.
Each additional woman carrying a concealed handgun reduces the murder rate for women three to four times more than an additional armed man reduces the murder rate for men.
Overall, some of the most heavily-armed states have very low violent crime rates and vice versa. Also, it appears that when the good guys are armed there is less gun violence. Research by John Lott shows that allowing citizens the right to carry concealed handguns reduces violent crime.
In those states that passed right-to-carry concealed handgun laws, the average murder rate dropped from 6.3 per 100,000 to 5.2 per 100,000 nine to 10 years later — about a 1.7% drop in the murder rate per year for 10 years.
In states that enacted right-to-carry laws between 1977 and 1999,
the overall occurrence of multiple-victim shootings dropped by a remarkable 67% with deaths and injuries from such shootings plummeting by 75% and 81%, respectively. And since 1997, two of eight school shootings were both stopped by citizens with guns (before police even arrived at the scene). So, unfortunately, Xo's speculation of what "perhaps" could happen, is pretty much the polar opposite of what has been happening
