“The incident began about 11:50 p.m. Friday in the 2900 block of North Milwaukee Avenue in Logan Square,” chicagotribune.com reports. “The Uber driver was parked on the east side of the street, while [22-year-old Everardo] Custodio was on the west side. . . A group of people were walking in front of the Uber driver on his side of the street when Custodio suddenly began firing at them, causing them to scatter. The Uber driver then pulled out a gun and fired six rounds at Custodio, striking him multiple times, according to court records.”
So let’s think about this. Gun control advocates say that your average American shouldn’t be armed because he’d, A) have his gun used against him, B) shoot the wrong person or, C) get shot by responding police officers. In this case…nope. Didn’t happen.
Custodio was at Advocate Illinois Masonic hospital, being treated for gunshot wounds to the shin, thigh and lower back.
Assuming one bullet per wound, the unnamed 47-year-old Little Italy concealed carrier had a hit ratio of 50 percent – which compares quite favorably with, say, the NYPD hit ratio of 34 percent. On a good day. On a bad day, not so much. Also, the Chicago armed defender didn’t hit any innocent bystanders.
We always upbraid the antis for presenting anecdotal evidence without statistical context. So we can’t say that armed civilians are better at taking out bad guys and creating less collateral damage than the police. Oh wait. Yes we can.
According to researcher Gary Kleck, “In defending themselves with their firearms, armed citizens kill 2,000 to 3,000 criminals each year, three times the number killed by the police.” [1993 stats via newsweek.com]. What’s more . . .
A nationwide study by Don Kates, the constitutional lawyer and criminologist, found that only 2 percent of civilian shootings involved an innocent person mistakenly identified as a criminal. The ‘error rate’ for the police, however, was 11 percent, more than five times as high.
As Michael Caine claims he never said, not a lot of people know that. They should.
[h/t DC Studios]