[GundamFan0083]

Originally Posted by james0246

@ GundamFan0083: Again, this is all anecdotal evidence. I can easily find lots of stories about people using their guns to defend themselves. Heck, go to any of the NRA websites and they'll hundreds of such stories. I'm asking for statistical proof that guns are more beneficial than harmful.

That's the best evidence you're going to find I'm afraid.
The national media in this country isn't interested in gun stories that save lives, they're not sensational enough nor do they fit the narrative that has been woven over the last forty years.

Sadly, this is a fool's errand since such research is hard to come by, especially considering that the NRA and the current Republican party (since the mid-90s) have gone out of their way to make it impossible for the government to properly fund any research that questions the use of firearms in modern society (to be a bit more specific, the CDC used to fund research into the deaths of all Americans (of which guns were a contributing factor), but the NRA forced the Republican majority at the time to either eliminate the program responsible for researching such data, or simply underfund the entire CDC (they went with underfunding the CDC, and would have continued to underfund the CDC unless they dropped their research (which they did)) all under the the belief that any research into any gun crimes is always partisan for gun control.

That's not true.
The NRA doesn't force anything.
It was the American people who lobbied congress not to pass any new gun bans to prevent further erosion of their rights.In fact, the NRA's membership rosters have declined as more and more gun owners join GOA.
I left the NRA when they supported the 1998 expansion of the Brady Law, and I then joined GOA.
JAMA did a fine job in their study BTW, but their findings were inconclusive, in short they found that gun laws do not increase nor prevent crime.

As for the CDC, they actually began shifting focus from guns to gangs in the 1990s because guns were a peripheral factor and not a primary cause of homicides in the USA.
The use of guns by gangs is not the reason they're killing each other, it's the gang itself that is the problem.

And it doesn't end with the CDC. Any real national research into guns, even if it simply research on how to make them safer, is often blocked by the NRA and the Republican Party on the national level. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) has been neutered for over a decade by being forced to keep gun statistics secret, and just recently the Republican congress has tried to force the National Institutes for Health (NIH) from doing any research into gun related deaths (which is still the 2nd most prevalent cause of death for young Americans).

BATFE is a piss poor agency that needs to be abolished.
They were formed from the Bureau of Prohibition after it separated from the IRS in the 1920s and have engaged in questionable behavior from the "Good Ol Boy" roundup of the 1990s, to entrapment of gun dealers, and now the Gunwalker/Fast & Furious fiasco.
They need to go.

Do the benefits of gun ownership outweigh the costs? Sadly, this question has become more difficult to objectively answer. On every front actual national research into whether or not guns are actually helpful has been blocked, destroyed, or otherwise forced into hiding (and any research that is released is instantly attacked as partisan even if the basic facts of the research are sound).

I'll answer it for you even though you meant it as a rhetorical question.
Yes, the benefits of gun ownership do in fact outweigh the costs when you consider how few guns (compared to the total number that are in private hands) are actually used in crime.
I've yet to see any credible evidence that shows research being blocked and quite honestly it sounds like a conspiracy theory.

I do currently believe in gun ownership, and I do believe in the right for the citizens of America to protect themselves (both from their neighbors, strangers, and if they have to their own government), but I do not know if guns are actually a good tool for protection (Consequently, gun ownership could actually be doing more harm than good).

If that were the case there would be far more deaths via firearms then there are now.
It is estimated that 30,000 guns are used in crime every year.
That represents 1/10,000th the total number of guns in the US (300,000,000 guns, low end of the scale estimate, some studies show it as high as 500mil).

edit: Here's one of the few decent studies that shows the lack of protection that guns provide (for various reasons described in the study)...

Ah yes Doctor Charles Branas' junk science "study" of 677 people randomly called on the phone and asked about whether they owned a gun for protection.
Doctor Eugene Volokh ripped that nonsense into confetti.

As he put it:
And all this is in addition to the possible confounding factors discussed in item 1 above. If there were no such confounders, then perhaps even a low odds ratio might be telling, or perhaps even a statistically insignificant odds ratio above 1 might in some measure undermine the “guns as protective” theory. But these two problems put together — the possibility that the result stems from the existence of a high-risk group whose members are especially likely both to carry guns and be the targets of attack, and the possibility of even slight misreporting dramatically affecting the results — make the study highly uninformative.

I'm not as charitable as Dr. Volokh is and I'll call Dr. Branas' "study" what it is--bullshit intended to mislead.

Here's why.
From Dr. Branas' own study:
As identified by police and medical examiners, they randomly selected 677 cases of Philadelphia residents who were shot in an assault from 2003 to 2006. Six percent of these cases were in possession of a gun (such as in a holster, pocket, waistband, or vehicle) when they were shot.

Six percent of 677 cases is only 41 cases from 2003-2006, that is such an infinitesimal amount compared to the number of news media stories found online that show successful defense with a firearm, that Dr. Branas' "study" is laughable in comparison.
If the same study was done in Texas, I'll bet the result would be quite different.

You yourself stated that you can find hundreds of cases of guns saving lives listed on the NRA website, well that's not quite accurate, a different website covers that.
Here it is, and there are hundreds of stories (526 to be exact from the 2011-2012 period).
http://gunssavelives.net/

So once again a pseudo-scientist tries and fails to push the propaganda of "your gun is deadlier to you than your assailant" which is complete rubbish and should be treated as such.

As Larry Pratt likes to say "Gun control is not about guns, or crime. It's about control."