A 27-year-old man was killed and 24 other people were shot after gunfire erupted early Sunday morning in Akron, Ohio, during what a police official said was a big birthday party.
Officers responded to 911 calls shortly after midnight, reporting shots fired and multiple victims struck in the area of Kelly Ave. and 8th Ave., according to a statement from the city’s mayor and police chief.
The shooting took place during a “large birthday party” that earlier in the night had more than 200 people in attendance, Akron Police Chief Brian Harding said in a Sunday evening news conference.
In the shooting’s aftermath, authorities found the scene “littered” with spent shell casings that stretched down a whole block, the police chief said.
Bad news sells. If I pull a gun on someone that’s threatening me, and they back off, where’s the news story? That’s not even likely going to make it to a police report, much less CNN. When you look at statistics on defensive gun use, it’s a little hard to pin down numbers, but the earliest claim dates to '97, was based on a phone survey, and was extrapolated by the US National Institute of Justice to be roughly 1.5 million cases of defensive gun use annually, with the overwhelming majority not involving any shots fired at all. Take this article for example; the methodology is a little shaky, but that’s in large part due to the fact that–per my example–most cases of defensive gun use are never even going to progress to a police report in the first place, so surveys and self-reports are the best you’re going to get.
FWIW, I would not say that I’ve ever had to use a firearm defensively. I’ve carried one on rare occasions, and carried a rifle when investigating load noises outside after dark (it’s usually a bear, TBH)
It’s both. The 2nd Amendment was based off of English Common Law, which said that the government couldn’t disarm the people, because the people had the right to defend themselves. The rationale that they wrote in the amendment was for militias. And, FWIW, when it was written, ‘militia’ was understood to be every able bodied male that was adult (and not old enough to be infirm), and they were expected to supply their own serviceable military-appropriate arms.
I don’t think that it’s reasonable to qualify a militia per se as a gang, since ‘gang’ implies that the purpose is criminal activity. A militia might be engaged in criminal activity (for instance, the 3%ers, Patriot Front, Proud Boys, etc.), but other militias do community activism (the various John Brown Gun Clubs).
So do lies and propaganda. That’s why pro-gun groups rely on imaginary threats, bullshit statistics and unverifiable anecdotes to justify a multi-billion dollar industry.