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ABC Facts
The Sniper's Paradise website is dedicated to and
designed for professional snipers. The articles, links, and information found in this section
of our site is designed
to keep our readers informed about who wants to take our pistols and
rifles and how they plan on doing it. The best way to stop the Gun
Grabbers in their steps is to research the enemy and know their tactics.
As they say, "knowledge is power!"
By Jonathan
Dube
ABCNEWS.com
Guns kill.They kill 34,000 Americans every year, 393 senior
citizens every month, 13 children every day.
They kill more teen-agers than any natural cause.
They kill mothers and daughters, grandpas and babies, good guys and bad.
Guns also protect. Crime victims are more than
twice as likely to walk away from an assailant unharmed if they use a gun
in self-defense.
Gun violence is not just a crime problem either.
Contrary to popular perception, most people who die looking down the
barrel of a gun are killed not by criminals, but by themselves.
Suicide statistics and the high rate of gun
deaths among the young have led medical groups and surgeons general to
make gun violence a public health issue. After all, medical and
psychological treatment for gunshot victims costs the U.S. health care
system an estimated $4 billion per year.
Loaded Facts
Whether you attack gun violence from a safety or a public health
perspective, there’s no question it’s a highly politicized debate.
Pro- and anti-gun-control groups routinely accuse each other of distorting
the truth. In such an atmosphere, it’s hard to know what and whom to
believe.
The most reliable statistics are probably those
from government agencies such as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention and the Department of Justice — particularly when they’re
citing concrete data, such as the number of people killed by guns.
But much of the information necessary for an
informed debate on gun violence comes in the form of estimates.
Believe It or
Not
Take, for example, the question of how often guns are used for
self-defense.
Gun control advocates say firearms are used
108,000 times a year for self-defense.
Gun control opponents say the figure is as high
as 2.5 million times a year.
Whom do you believe?
The 108,000 figure comes from the Justice
Department’s National Crime Victimization Survey, the nation’s most
comprehensive survey of victims. But gun control opponents discount the
number, arguing that many people who used guns to protect themselves
successfully don’t consider themselves victims and thus are not counted
by the study.
They prefer the 2.5 million estimate from Florida
State University criminologist Gary Kleck, who surveyed 5,000 households
and examined other studies. Gun control advocates reject Kleck’s
conclusions because, they say, his sample size was too small to be
accurate.
Studying
Studies
The political climate surrounding guns is so intense that studies have
been done of studies that have been done about studies. Philip Cook, the
director of Duke University’s public policy institute, has examined the
data behind the 108,000 and the 2.5 million figures and suspects the truth
lies somewhere in between.
“Many of the basic statistics about guns are in
wide disagreement with each other depending on which source you go to,”
says Cook, a member of the apolitical National Consortium on Violence
Research. “That’s been a real puzzle to people who are trying to
understand what’s going on.”
With this in mind, we’ve compiled a guide
through the labyrinth of data about guns. Click on the image above to see
some of the essential — and most reliable — facts about gun violence.
And find out what your chances are of dying at gunpoint. 
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