The real facts of defensive use of guns by responsible gun owners vs. the tired rhetoric of the liberals.

Illinois has tougher gun laws than many other states. The state is one of seven that requires licenses or permits to buy any firearm, and it’s one of five that requires waiting periods for buying any firearm.

Yet, there were more than 4,000 shooting victims in Chicago in 2016—and Chicago has suffered a spike in gun crime recently. In 2016, homicides in Chicago sharply rose, mostly as a result of gun homicides, as the University of Chicago crime lab found in a January report.

Gun homicides in the city rose by 61 percent between 2015 and 2016. That helped make the gun homicide rate in Chicago particularly huge compared to other similar cities. The rate was 25.1 per 100,000 residents in 2016, compared to 14.7 in Philadelphia and just 2.3 in New York.

It also had a relatively high number of guns recovered — 243 per 100,000 residents. That’s roughly on par with Philadelphia and much higher than Los Angeles or New York.

In 2013, Chicago’s own, President Obama, ordered the Department of Health and Human Services and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to “conduct or sponsor research into the causes of gun violence and the ways to prevent it.” In response, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention asked the Institute of Medicine and National Research Council to “convene a committee of experts to develop a potential research agenda focusing on the public health aspects of firearm-related violence….” This committee studied the issue of defensive gun use and reported:

• Defensive use of guns by crime victims is a common occurrence, although the exact number remains disputed….
• Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive use of guns by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million….
• Some scholars point to a radically lower estimate of only 108,000 annual defensive use of guns based on the National Crime Victimization Survey, but this estimate of 108,000 is difficult to interpret because respondents were not asked specifically about defensive gun use.
• Studies that directly assessed the effect of actual defensive use of guns (i.e., incidents in which a gun was ‘used’ by the crime victim in the sense of attacking or threatening an offender) have found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies….