Hodgden powder company is celebrating 75 years in business and continues to expand with the

addition of accurate and ramp shot powders that are easy to load. Hodgden powder company,

the gun powder people. All right, welcome again. It is gun talk. I'm Tom Gresham,

glad that you could be with us today. We've got a lot of things going on today. A lot of

things to talk about. We were talking about, well obviously guns, if you're unfamiliar with the

show, it's guns shooting, hunting, of course sporting use of guns and defensive use of guns

and the politics of guns. You can't get away from any of that when we talk about that.

There's also a lot going on at the NRA where a couple of weeks away from the NRA

annual meetings in Houston. Some developments there where we talked about that later in the show.

And you know, we have been talking, if you've listed it all, we talk about defensive gun uses.

And there's been a lot of discussion about how many times do people actually use guns in self-defense?

It's one of those demarcation points where the folks who don't like guns or want to ban guns,

they say, well, it hardly ever happens. Well, let's talk to somebody who actually knows this stuff,

bringing in right now, Dave Coppel. He is the research director at the Independence Institute,

also connected Dave with Kato as well as I remember. That's right. Thanks for having me. You bet.

So we try to use the various studies out there and there are a lot of them of how many times

do people use guns in self-defense? We have John Lott's book, the bias against guns. He talked about

that, the fact that so often self-defense gun uses don't get reported in the news, leaving the

public with the impression that it hardly ever happens. Is that fair? That's true. And it's also true

that defensive gun uses to the extent they do make the news tend to be a local story, not a national one.

There's, as you say, there's a lot of numbers on defensive gun use and the most recent

best estimate is about 1.6 million annually. Most of the serious scholars who have looked at it

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