“It’s pretty rare,” David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, said, despite the fact that gun violence in the U.S. is exceptionally common. There are more guns in the country than people, and nearly 40,000 Americans died because of gun violence in 2019. A majority of those deaths were suicides. From 2007 to 2011, only about 1 percent of people who were crime victims claimed to have used a gun to protect themselves — and the average person had “basically no chance in their lifetime ever to use a gun in self-defense,” Dr. Hemenway told NPR in 2018. |