Decius wrote:

The legal ruling that the District's citizens can keep loaded handguns in their homes doesn't mean that they should.

Just nine of those shootings were legally justifiable homicides or acts of self-defense; guns kept in homes were also involved in 12 accidental deaths, 41 criminal homicides and a shocking 333 suicides.

In Atlanta, a city where approximately a third of households contain guns, a study of 197 home-invasion crimes revealed only three instances (1.5 percent) in which the inhabitants resisted with a gun. Intruders got to the homeowner's gun twice as often as the homeowner did.

I know a lot of people who explain their gun ownership based on the theory that they are going to defend themselves from some sort of home invasion. I think of this a bit like I think of Ralphie Parker's dreams of fending off Black Bart with his BB gun. In general, your home is not going to be invaded while you are there, and you are not going to defend yourself this way if it does happen. Shooting can be a fun hobby, but you're not John Wayne.

Right-To-Carry and crime trends: Studying crime trends in every county in the U.S., John Lott and David Mustard found, “allowing citizens to carry concealed weapons deters violent crimes and it appears to produce no increase in accidental deaths. If those states which did not have Right to Carry concealed gun provisions had adopted them in 1992, approximately 1,570 murders; 4,177 rapes; and over 60,000 aggravated assaults would have been avoided yearly....[W]hen state concealed handgun laws went into effect in a county, murders fell by 8.5 percent, and rapes and aggravated assaults fell by 5 and 7 percent.”

(attribution: Lott, “Crime, Deterrence, and Right To Carry Concealed Handguns,” 1996. available for download here: http://www.dr-security.com/reference/lott.pdf)

RE: Guns for Safety? Dream On, Scalia. - washingtonpost.com