"Snag" wrote in message ...


"crime of passoin/hate/lost girlfriend"

Here is some justifiable homicide data for the year 2005, there is probably more up to date info but I doubt there has been a tremendous change since that time.

I'm making the assumtion that the overwhelming majority of these homicides are were by firearms although probably at least a few of them were by other means.

http://www.bjs.gov/content/homicide/justify.cfm

Total including police action for that year appears to be about 550 and is it about 200 when you include only citizens.

Total gun deaths for that year were about 31,000 of which around 1/2 were suicides which leaves us with a total of about 15,000

In other words, out of the approximately 14,650 citizens that were killed with a gun by another citizen, only 200 of them were justifiable.

In that same year, there were 789 unintentional firearms deaths in the US:

http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region/united-states

So, if we round this number upwards to 200, it becomes clearly evident that on average, your garden variety, law-abiding gun owner is statistically about 4 times more likely to cause an accidental death than he is to shoot some a bad guy in a case of justifiable homicide.

Below is a paper covering domestic violence statistics for the year 2002:

bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/pdf/fvs02.pdf

It can be seen that about 22% of murders in that year were acts of domestic violence and that firearms were used in around 1/2 or 11% of of them and so it should become fairly evident that your odds shooting someone in an act of justifiable homicide as opposed to being shot by or shooting a family member or there occurring a suicide in the family are pretty darned slim considering that if memory serves me, justifiable homicides including police action only constitute around 2% of total gun deaths.

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