The Challenges of Defining and Measuring Defensive Gun Use - "the implied rates of DGU in response to specific crime types appear to be inconsistent with known rates of those crimes. For instance, Hemenway (1997) calculates that the 845,000 DGUs during burglaries implied by the NSDS exceeds the total estimate of burglaries that occurred against victims who owned guns, were home, and were awake when the crime occurred... Branas et al. (2009) took an entirely different approach to assessing the perceived benefits of DGU. They considered whether gun possession increased the likelihood that an individual was shot or killed in an assault. They assessed the circumstances surrounding 677 individuals shot in Philadelphia. The police determined that, in 6 percent of these cases, the victims had a gun in their possession at the time they were shot. The authors compared these cases with controls recruited by a survey firm via random digit–dialing and asked about gun possession at the time when matched cases had been shot; about 7 percent of controls had a gun in their possession. Comparing cases and controls, Branas et al. (2009) found that when victims had a gun in their possession, they had 4.46 times higher odds of being shot compared with victims who had no gun. The authors’ second set of results incorporated whether victims had a chance to defend themselves. Among those who had the opportunity to resist, those with a gun were even more likely to be shot than those without a gun... At first glance, individuals engaged in DGU appear less likely to lose property and suffer injury and more likely to report that their action helped the outcome. However, several important caveats emerge. First, it is not clear that DGU is uniquely beneficial relative to other actions. Second, given that the literature is largely based on cross-tabulations and relatively basic multivariate analyses, when associations are found between DGU and reduced injury, for instance, it is not clear whether this is due to a causal effect of the DGUs on reduced injury or whether the circumstances that make a DGU possible also make injury less likely. In the latter case, it may not be DGUs that reduce the likelihood of injury but rather unique features of the circumstances in which DGUs occur. For instance, individuals may be more likely to defend themselves with a weapon when they feel that they have a greater opportunity to be successful in that defense, which may bias estimates toward a beneficial impact of gun use. Statistical models designed to identify the causal effect of DGUs on various outcomes have not yet been reported."
Priorities for Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence - "Defensive use of guns by crime victims is a common occurrence, although the exact number remains disputed (Cook and Ludwig, 1996; Kleck, 2001a). Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses 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 (Kleck, 2001a), in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008 (BJS, 2010). On the other hand, some scholars point to a radically lower estimate of only 108,000 annual defensive uses based on the National Crime Victimization Survey (Cook et al., 1997). The variation in these numbers remains a controversy in the field. The estimate of 3 million defensive uses per year is based on an extrapolation from a small number of responses taken from more than 19 national surveys. The former estimate of 108,000 is difficult to interpret because respondents were not asked specifically about defensive gun use... Even when defensive use of guns is effective in averting death or injury for the gun user in cases of crime, it is still possible that keeping a gun in the home or carrying a gun in public—concealed or open carry— may have a different net effect on the rate of injury. For example, if gun ownership raises the risk of suicide, homicide, or the use of weapons by those who invade the homes of gun owners, this could cancel or outweigh the beneficial effects of defensive gun use (Kellermann et al., 1992, 1993, 1995)... more than 600 people in the United States died as a result of an unintentional discharge of a firearm in 2010"
Firearm Justifiable Homicides and Non-Fatal Self Defense Gun Use - "In 2014, there were only 224 justifiable homicides involving a gun. For the five-year period 2010 through 2014, there were only 1,125 justifiable homicides involving a gun... In 2014 for every justifiable homicide in the United States involving a gun, guns were used in 34 criminal homicides. For the five-year period 2010 through 2014, for every justifiable homicide in the United States involving a gun, guns were used in 36 criminal homicides"
It seems you are 3x more likely to accidentally shoot and kill someone than to shoot and kill a criminal. Of course, one way to explain this away is to claim that criminals are deterred when they see a gun, or when a gun is waved around, and you don't actually need to shoot them, much less kill them. But...
Survey Research and Self-Defense Gun Use: An Explanation of Extreme Overestimates - "Two aspects of the K-G survey combine to create severe misestimation. The first is the likelihood of positive social desirability response, sometimes referred to as personal presentation bias. An individual who purchases a gun for self-defense and then uses it successfully to ward off a criminal is displaying the wisdom of his precautions and his capability in protecting himself, his loved ones, and his property. His action is to be commended and admired. Some positive social desirability response bias, by itself, might not lead to serious overestimation. However, combined with a second aspect of the survey-the attempt to estimate a very rare event-it does. The search for a "needle in a haystack" has major methodological dangers, especially where researchers try to extrapolate the findings to society as a whole. Until the K-G study, no one had estimated that even as many as 1% of adult civilians had used a gun in self-defense in the past year... The fact that the survey is trying to estimate a low probability event also means that a small percentage bias, when extrapolated, can lead to extreme overestimates... The K-G survey design contains a huge overestimation bias. The authors do little to reduce the bias or to validate their findings by external measures. All checks for external validity of the Kleck-Gertz finding confirm that their estimate is highly exaggerated... Previous data on self-defense gun use came from two sources - the large National Crime Victimization surveys (NCVS), and smaller private surveys (principally random-digit-dial telephone surveys). These two sources produce markedly different results... A review of Kleck's analysis argued that "Kleck's conclusions rest on limited data and strong assumptions. Small changes in the procedure produce large differences in the findings. The estimates are questionable, and it appears unwise to place much weight on them". A National Research Council report also finds that Kleck's estimates appear exaggerated and says that it is almost certain that "some of what respondents designate as their own self-defense would be construed as aggression by others"... Self-report surveys tend to overestimate rare events which carry no social stigma, and such surveys can wildly overestimate rare events which have some social desirability. The overestimation problem is probably best explained in the context of the screening of diseases... Consider the responses to a national random-digit-dial telephone survey of over 1500 adults conducted in May 1994 by ABC News and the Washington Post. One question asked: "Have you yourself ever seen anything that you believe was a spacecraft from another planet?" Ten percent of respondents answered in the affirmative. These 150 individuals were then asked, "Have you personally ever been in contact with aliens from another planet or not?" and 6% answered 'Yes." By extrapolating to the national population, we might conclude that almost 20 million Americans have seen spacecraft from another planet, and over a million have been in personal contact with aliens from other planets... Using a gun in self-defense, like having contact with an alien, is an interesting, potentially exciting event that might well be heroic. In the K-G survey, many of those who report a self-defense gun use apparently see themselves as quite heroic. Were we to accept their claims, people using guns in self-defense are saving about 400,000 people each year from being murdered. Yet most people do not have guns and there were only a total of 27,000 homicides in 1992... False positives can also come from external "telescoping," the reporting of events that actually occurred, but were outside the time frame in question. Unlike the one-shot K-G survey, the NCVS questions the same household every six months. Analysis of the NCVS unbounded (or first-time) panel in comparison with the second indicates a substantial amount of telescoping of criminal victimization. Unbounded rates of reported victimization are typically 30% to 40% higher than bounded rates... While K-G do not believe that 60 out of 5000 respondents in their own survey might be misclassified, they are quite ,willing to speculate that over 95% of the individuals who used their guns in self-defense in the past year deliberately lie to the NCVS surveyors... all reality checks indicate that the K-G victimization and gun use results are highly exaggerated... if we believe the K-G results, women (the vast majority of whom do not own guns) defend themselves with guns in almost 40% of all sexual assaults... K-G report that 392,000 times per year a gun defender thought that someone almost certainly would have been killed had the gun not been used; that another 355,000 times someone probably would have been killed; and another 405,000 times someone might have been killed if the gun had not been used for protection. The K-G results imply that many hundreds of thousands of murders should have been occurring when a private gun was not available for protection. Yet guns are rarely carried, less than a third of adult Americans personally own guns, and only 27,000 homicides occurred in 1992. Given the number of victims allegedly being saved with guns, it would seem natural to conclude that owning a gun substantially reduces your chances of being murdered. Yet a careful case-control study of homicide in the home found that a gun in the home was associated with an increased rather than a reduced risk of homicide. Finally, the 2.5 million figure would lead us to conclude that, in a serious crime, the victim is three to four times more likely than the offender to have and use a gun. Although the criminal determines when and where a crime occurs, although pro-gun advocates claim that criminals can always get guns, although few potential victims carry guns away from home, the criminal, according to K-G, is usually outgunned by the individual he is trying to assault, burglarize, rob or rape. The explanation K-G offer for this finding is nonsensical. That defensive gun use is substantially more common than criminal gun use, they write, "should not come as a surprise, given that there are far more gun-owning crime victims than there are gun-owning criminals and that victimization is spread out over many different victims, while offending is more concentrated among a relatively small number of offenders." In fact, criminals are more rather than less likely than victims to possess guns"
How Often Do People Use Guns In Self-Defense? - "One of the most commonly cited estimates of defensive gun uses, published in 1995 by criminologists Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz, concluded there are between 2.2 and 2.5 million defensive gun uses annually. One of the main criticisms of this estimate is that researchers can't seem to find the people who are shot by civilians defending themselves because they don't show up in hospital records. "The Kleck-Gertz survey suggests that the number of DGU respondents who reported shooting their assailant was over 200,000, over twice the number of those killed or treated [for gunshots] in emergency departments," crime prevention researcher Philip Cook wrote in the book Envisioning Criminology... Kleck says, criminals who were wounded after a gun was used in self-defense also have no incentive to go to the emergency room because medical professionals have an obligation to report it to the police. But Hemenway points out that if people don't go to the hospital to treat the original gunshot wound, they will inevitably end up there "with sepsis or other major problems."... Even if someone wanted to use a gun in self-defense, they probably wouldn't be very successful, says Mike Weisser, firearms instructor and author of the blog "Mike The Gun Guy." He says many people who carry a gun aren't properly trained to use it in this way, and there is no performance validation standard for police officers. "If we don't even have a minimum standard, not for training, but for performance validation for our law enforcement," he says, "how in God's name is anybody going to say, 'Well, just because you have a gun in your pocket, you know how to use it in self-defense?' You don't.""
For every gun used in self-defense, six more are used to commit a crime - The Washington Post - "not only are self-defense gun uses rare -- people defended themselves with a gun in roughly 0.9 percent of crimes committed over this period -- but in many cases they don't lead to better outcomes for crime victims. "The likelihood of injury when there was a self-defense gun use (10.9%) was basically identical to the likelihood of injury when the victim took no action at all (11.0%)," Hemenway and co-author Sara J. Solnik found. Looking at what happened after people took action to prevent a crime, Hemenway and Solnik found that people were far better off either running away, or calling the cops if possible, rather than attempting to stop a crime with a gun. "Running away and calling the police were associated with a reduced likelihood of injury after taking action; self-defense gun use was not," they write. The use of guns were, however, were linked to better outcomes in certain circumstances. In cases of robbery and burglary, victims who didn't try to stop the crime lost property nearly 85 percent of the time. Victims who attacked the intruders or threatened them with a gun had a better outcome, losing property 39 percent of the time. But those are slightly worse odds than for victims who fought back with other weapons -- this latter group lost property 35 percent of the time... "Whenever you’re surveying about a rare event like DGUs, estimates may well be inflated by the small fraction of respondents who are drunk or deluded or simply having fun," he said. He points out that the percentage of people reporting a defensive gun use in Kleck's survey is similar to the percentage of Americans who say they've been abducted by aliens. A more reasonable estimate, based on the National Crime Victimization Survey, would peg the annual number of self-defense gun uses to be around 100,000 per year. Researchers generally view these estimates as more reliable because the NCVS includes a much larger sample size and it surveys the same households multiple times, which ensures that people are recalling events more accurately. To be sure, 100,000 is still a very large number. But there's another problem, too, and that's that there's a lot of murkiness around what "self-defense" really means. "Self-defense is an ambiguous term and whether one is a defender or a perpetrator may depend on perspective," Hemenway and Solnik write in their latest research. In a 2000 study, Hemenway and colleagues asked criminal court judges to read 35 accounts of gun owners who said they used their guns in self-defense in a national survey. In the judges' opinions, over half of these gun uses were probably illegal... men who said they were acting in self-defense were actually committing crimes of aggression using a gun. The simplistic narrative of "good guys" versus "bad guys" is often inadequate to describe the complicated interactions between people and their firearms"
Gun Threats and Self-Defense Gun Use - "Using data from a national random-digit-dial telephone survey conducted under the direction of the Harvard Injury Control Center, we examined the extent and nature of offensive gun use. We found that firearms are used far more often to frighten and intimidate than they are used in self-defense. All reported cases of criminal gun use, as well as many of the so-called self-defense gun uses, appear to be socially undesirable...
Using data from a national random-digit-dial telephone survey conducted under the direction of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, we investigated how and when guns are used in the home. We found that guns in the home are used more often to frighten intimates than to thwart crime; other weapons are far more commonly used against intruders than are guns...
Criminals who are shot are typically the victims of crime Using data from a survey of detainees in a Washington D.C. jail, we worked with a prison physician to investigate the circumstances of gunshot wounds to these criminals. We found that one in four of these detainees had been wounded, in events that appear unrelated to their incarceration. Most were shot when they were victims of robberies, assaults and crossfires. Virtually none report being wounded by a “law-abiding citizen.”
Using data from surveys of detainees in six jails from around the nation, we worked with a prison physician to determine whether criminals seek hospital medical care when they are shot. Criminals almost always go to the hospital when they are shot. To believe fully the claims of millions of self-defense gun uses each year would mean believing that decent law-abiding citizens shot hundreds of thousands of criminals. But the data from emergency departments belie this claim, unless hundreds of thousands of wounded criminals are afraid to seek medical care. But virtually all criminals who have been shot went to the hospital, and can describe in detail what happened there.
Victims use guns in less than 1% of contact crimes, and women never use guns to protect themselves against sexual assault (in more than 300 cases). Victims using a gun were no less likely to be injured after taking protective action than victims using other forms of protective action. Compared to other protective actions, the National Crime Victimization Surveys provide little evidence that self-defense gun use is uniquely beneficial in reducing the likelihood of injury or property loss. This article helps provide accurate information concerning self-defense gun use. It shows that many of the claims about the benefits of gun ownership are largely myths."
So much for criminals being afraid to go to the hospital
Injuries and deaths due to firearms in the home - "For every time a gun in the home was used in a self-defense or legally justifiable shooting, there were four unintentional shootings, seven criminal assaults or homicides, and 11 attempted or completed suicides."
You are 4 times more likely to shoot someone by mistake than to defend yourself
Have Gun Will Shoot? Weapon Instrumentality, Intent, and the Violent Escalation of Conflict - "The weapon instrumentality hypothesis suggests that guns contribute to the escalation and lethality of violence. But the relationship between guns and violence might be spurious if the aggressor's violent tendencies or the aggressor's situation-specific intent to harm is the common cause of the presence/use of a gun and the violent outcome. To examine such rival explanations, we draw on interviews with 100 men imprisoned for an aggravated assault or homicide that stemmed from an interpersonal conflict. Each respondent described a matched pair of conflicts: the violent conflict that led to incarceration and a similar nonviolent conflict from the same time period. The matched pair design allows us to control for both potential sources of spuriousness: violent tendencies and situation-specific intent to harm. The results suggest that guns contribute to the violent escalation of conflict, but the impact of guns attenuates substantially after accounting for situation-specific intent to harm... Each respondent described a matched pair of conflicts: the violent conflict that led to incarceration and a similar nonviolent conflict from the same time period... the matched pair design does not control for situational influences. Thus, we control for six potential confounders at the situational level... opponent gun (1 = opponent brandished gun during conflict)... Model 2 controls for the respondent’s level of anger and other potential situational confounders, but again the controls produce no change in the odds ratio or significance level for respondent gun"
Gun nuts like to claim that guns reduce crime because when criminals see someone else with a gun they get scared off (i.e. "defensive gun use"), but all they have is anecdotes and anyway it is belied by the evidence - there is no deterrent effect on violence. Plus, they make violence more likely in the first place, so even if seeing a gun scares some people off, having fewer guns would almost certainly result in less violence in the first place (of course, the cope is that criminals will always have guns, which is belied by evidence and assumes everyone who uses a gun in the wrong way was already a criminal before the crime)
One ad hoc argument is that in some cases, aggressors are deterred when seeing someone else's firearm - this is a biased sample since these were the people who got caught and imprisoned for violence. But the study used a matched pairs design, which gets around this problem - if the ad hoc argument is right, then via the similar nonviolent conflicts, we would see a deterrent effect of both sides being armed
One gun nut didn't read this and kept alleging phantom problems (e.g. not looking at cases where there was no violent outcome, not controlling for the other party having a gun), and I kept pointing out how his objections were spurious, until he kept quiet
Defensive Gun Use Is Not a Myth - "Here are the facts Kleck missed: According to his own survey more than 50 percent of respondents claim to have reported their defensive gun use to the police. This means we should find at least half of his 2.5 million annual Defensive Gun Uses (DGUs) in police reports alone. Instead, the most comprehensive nonpartisan effort to catalog police and media reports on DGUs by The Gun Violence Archive was barely able to find 1,600 in 2014. Where are the remaining 99.94 percent of Kleck’s supposed DGUs hiding?"
Deadly knife crime: How does London compare to New York? - "while official statistics show a clear increase in knife crime in London, they also confirm that the murder rate is well below most US cities... there were 285 knife murders in England and Wales in 2017/18 — the highest number since the Second World War — and 34 in Scotland, giving a combined British rate of 0.48 per 100,000. In the US, the number for 2017 was 1,591, giving an almost identical rate of 0.49. So even amid a spike in British knife crime, Americans as a whole are at least as likely as to die from a stabbing."
Some gun nut claimed banning guns wouldn't help since people would just switch to knives, like in the UK. So much for that
"If knives are as dangerous as guns, then why do guns rights activists think they need guns for protection? If you can do as much damage with a knife, then shouldn't a knife provide as much protection as a gun?"
Effects of Background Checks on Violent Crime - "available studies provide moderate evidence that dealer background checks may reduce firearm homicides and inconclusive evidence for the effect of private-seller background checks on firearm homicides."
Universal Background Checks - "Fourteen states (California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Nevada , New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington) and the District of Columbia generally require universal background checks at the point of sale for all sales of all classes of firearms, whether they are purchased from a licensed dealer or an unlicensed seller. (Most of these states’ background check laws apply both to sales and other non-temporary firearm transfers, although laws enacted in New Mexico and Virginia exempt transfers that are not made for a fee or other remuneration)."
I've seen many people claim that "universal background checks" are a red herring because background checks already exist, and the word "universal" is a motherhood statement that doesn't mean anything. Ironically, they love to mock those who support gun control for being ignorant about guns, when they don't know about the gun show loophole, for example, and claim that you always need ID to buy a gun in the US.
Firearm registration requirements by state - "As of January 1, 2019, seven states and the District of Columbia required individuals to register their ownership of certain firearms with local law enforcement agencies. Another nine states explicitly prohibited the creation of such registries. The remaining states neither required registration of firearms nor prohibited the creation of registries in the future."
And yet some pro-gun people mock the comparison of guns to cars and claim that guns are more strictly regulated than cars
Licensing - "“License to own”: Three states—Illinois, Massachusetts, and New York—require a license to own firearms (New York’s law applies only to handguns). Unlike a permit to purchase, a license to own a firearm must remain valid for as long as the person owns the firearm.
Firearm Safety Certificate: Two states—California and Washington—require prospective firearm purchasers to first obtain a certificate showing that they have completed required firearm safety training. California requires this for all firearms, Washington requires it only for semiautomatic rifles.
Registration: One jurisdiction—the District of Columbia—has a registration law that also functions as a license requirement."
How could mass shootings be prevented? Research shows certain policies may help - "One was a requirement that a gun purchaser go through a licensing process. "A licensing process requires someone to, you know, directly apply and engage with law enforcement, sometimes there's safety training and other requirements," says Webster. Another approach that seemed to reduce deaths from mass shootings was state bans on buying large-capacity magazines or ammunition-feeding devices for semiautomatic weapons. That makes intuitive sense, says Webster, because these items allow a shooter to fire many bullets in a short amount of time without interruption. If a shooter has to stop and reload, victims could escape or fight back. There's another study of mass shootings showing that this kind of law seemed to have a protective effect. David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, worked with colleagues to examine the effect of banning large-capacity magazines on almost three decades of mass shootings in different states. "The states which had bans did much better in terms of having fewer mass shootings, and the mass shootings that occurred were much less lethal in terms of the number of people dying," says Hemenway. In the wake of a mass shooting, people often argue for the need for comprehensive background checks, says Webster. He supports that policy but says his research doesn't show that it's linked to a reduction in this particular kind of deadly event. An additional common refrain after a mass shooting, he says, is a call for policies that make it easier for people to carry guns so they can defend themselves. "Well, guess what, the data do not bear that out at all," says Webster. "If anything, it shows higher rates of fatal mass shootings in response to weaker regulations for concealed carry by civilians." And while school systems might try to respond to the threat of mass shootings by having police officers on site or having students go through drills, "as far as I know, there's not strong research about any of those things," says Hemenway. Keeping guns away from young people, whether through safe storage of firearms in a home or age restrictions on purchasing, would be expected to have a protective effect, says Webster, based on data showing that "the peak ages for violent offending with firearms is roughly 18 to 21."... One emerging policy option that has some preliminary evidence behind it is allowing police officers to temporarily take guns away from people who seem to pose an imminent danger. A study in California that looked at how this process got used over a two-year period in that state found 21 occasions when it was done in response to threats of a mass shooting — several of which involved schools. It's not possible to know if taking away those guns actually prevented mass shootings, but researchers say it's still important data given the general dearth of information and limited funding for research. One study in 2017 found that guns killed about as many people each year as sepsis, a life-threatening response to infection, but funding for gun violence research was about 0.7% of that for sepsis."
What schools and elected officials can do to prevent school shootings - "arming teachers is a bad idea "because it invites numerous disasters and problems, and the chances of it actually helping are so minuscule." In 2018, a Gallup poll also found that most teachers do not want to carry guns in school, and overwhelmingly favor gun control measures over security steps meant to "harden" schools... A 2019 report from the Secret Service found that in half the school shootings they studied, the gun used was either readily accessible at home or not meaningfully secured... A lot of the conversation around making schools safer has centered on hardening schools by adding police officers and metal detectors. But experts say schools should actually focus on softening to support the social and emotional needs of students."
The AR-15 Is Different: What I Learned Treating Parkland Victims - The Atlantic - "I was looking at a CT scan of one of the mass-shooting victims from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, who had been brought to the trauma center during my call shift. The organ looked like an overripe melon smashed by a sledgehammer, and was bleeding extensively. How could a gunshot wound have caused this much damage? The reaction in the emergency room was the same. One of the trauma surgeons opened a young victim in the operating room, and found only shreds of the organ that had been hit by a bullet from an AR-15, a semiautomatic rifle that delivers a devastatingly lethal, high-velocity bullet to the victim. Nothing was left to repair—and utterly, devastatingly, nothing could be done to fix the problem. The injury was fatal... I have seen a handful of AR-15 injuries in my career. Years ago I saw one from a man shot in the back by a SWAT team. The injury along the path of the bullet from an AR-15 is vastly different from a low-velocity handgun injury. The bullet from an AR-15 passes through the body like a cigarette boat traveling at maximum speed through a tiny canal. The tissue next to the bullet is elastic—moving away from the bullet like waves of water displaced by the boat—and then returns and settles back. This process is called cavitation; it leaves the displaced tissue damaged or killed. The high-velocity bullet causes a swath of tissue damage that extends several inches from its path. It does not have to actually hit an artery to damage it and cause catastrophic bleeding. Exit wounds can be the size of an orange. With an AR-15, the shooter does not have to be particularly accurate. The victim does not have to be unlucky. If a victim takes a direct hit to the liver from an AR-15, the damage is far graver than that of a simple handgun-shot injury. Handgun injuries to the liver are generally survivable unless the bullet hits the main blood supply to the liver. An AR-15 bullet wound to the middle of the liver would cause so much bleeding that the patient would likely never make it to the trauma center to receive our care."
Apparently this is not good enough for self defence
This gun enthusiast claimed that even 5.56mm rounds are inadequate for anything bigger than a coyote and not good enough for self defence, and that armed forces including the US use it "Because the light weight allows for the infantry to carry more rounds and a wounded enemy soldier is as good or better than a dead one." So in a war, it is better to wound an enemy soldier than to kill him, even if he will still be shooting back at you because he is only wounded But if you're defending yourself from attack in a civilian setting, you need a larger round because you're in more danger than soldiers in a war. The US is even more dangerous than I thought
Meme - Death Star PR: "The only way to stop bad people with a Death Star is with good people with their own Death Star. The only reasonable way to guarantee the safety of the galaxy is for everyone to have their own Death Star."
Weapons of mass destruction don't kill people. People kill people
