One of the biggest myths of the NRA and gun advocates is that guns are critical for self-protection and the saying goes that all that is necessary to ward off an attack of a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. The NRA likes to frame things in this dichotomy of “good vs. evil” creating a simplification of reality very appealing to conservatives. In doing so they neglect the accidents which are all too common like the recent incident in which a two-year-old found the gun of his mother’s boyfriend under a car seat and accidentally shot his mother in the back killing her.

Well, even the myth of guns being used frequently for defensive purposes turns out to be another falsehood. According to a recent study by the Violence Policy Center (VPC) citing data collected by the Federal Bureau of Investigation:

In 2012, across the nation there were only 259 justifiable homicides involving a private citizen using a firearm reported to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program as detailed in its Supplementary Homicide Report (SHR).

That same year, there were 8,342 criminal gun homicides tallied in the SHR. In 2012, for every justifiable homicide in the United States involving a gun, guns were used in 32 criminal homicides. And this ratio, of course, does not take into account the tens of thousands of lives ended in gun suicides or unintentional shootings that year.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marvin-meadors/another-nra-myth-exposed-_b_9792082.html