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Originally Posted by PersonaNonGrata
Now you might ask "what if the citizen makes a mistake". Well, that can happen and does rarely and there is recourse for that. Invalid or imperfect self-defense can result in a manslaughter conviction. On the other hand, if the citizen is not allowed any sort of self-defense the result for him could be death.
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I appreciate reading your point of view.
I think it is worth separating law enforcement gun use from private citizen gun use. Picking up on your point about the potential of a private citizen making a mistake, it seems to me that mistake could potentially be shooting in error, failing to secure the weapon from unauthorized use, failure to obtain appropriate training, and so on. Here is one view of some of the results of those failures, although the data is somewhat dated:
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Injuries and Deaths from Guns
Every time a gun injures or kills in self‐defense, one is used
11 times for a completed or attempted suicide
7 times in a criminal assault or homicide
4 times in an unintentional shooting death or injury
Source: Journal of Trauma, injury, Infection and Critical Care (1998)
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So by those statistics, guns don't appear to be an efficient form of self defence on a societal basis, considering the costs to society of all those other consequences. They certainly may be efficient on an individual basis, as long as the gun owner never suffers from the consequences listed above.
Since this is a BMW board, and since one of the most popular topics to debate here is whether it is worth changing transmission fluid to extend the life of ZF and GM transmissions installed in BMW vehicles, let's do a comparison.
Let's say 25% of us decided to change our transmission fluid to extend our transmission life. And let's say we had real data that said that for every time one of us who changed their fluid avoided a transmission failure, 22 other transmissions blew up, whether they were ours or not. Wouldn't we begin to wonder whether it was a good idea to keep changing the transmission fluid, even though we each currently have a clear right to do so? And if we wanted to change the fluid, individually, would it be a good idea for those of us who did so to do so on average four times? For background, some statistics put gun ownership at 25% of US citizens, and the average US gun owner has four guns. Rough figures. Anyway, I fully accept that it is a silly analogy. Just trying to put it in perspective.