There's absolutely no reason for anyone to own a gun for self-defense...

[Beet]

Surveys on the "number of defensive gun uses" are notoriously bad; basically, the question is extremely subjective and there is no real way of knowing whether it was a real defensive use and what would have happened without the gun. So any statistic cited on number of defensive uses per year is extremely suspect.

Meanwhile, a lot of research shows that "A broad array of evidence indicates that gun availability is a risk factor for homicide, both in the United States and across high-income countries.  Case-control studies, ecological time-series and cross-sectional studies indicate that in homes, cities, states and regions in the US, where there are more guns, both men and women are at higher risk for homicide, particularly firearm homicide."

This too is disputed because obviously this has become a very politicized debate and it is very difficult to separate out objective social-scientific studies with politically motivated ones, even within academia.

Nor is any of this to say that [1] all guns are always bad or [2] guns should be 'taken away'. Just that there is a lot of pseudo science or only looking at what you want to see from both sides out there.

[Beet]

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1,500,000 is the conservative number from the Department of Justice. Unless you want to swallow the VPC discredited talking points and allege that the DOJ is cooking the books for some reason, you have no leg to stand on here.

Not to mention Cook, Ludwig and Hemenway have been thoroughly debunked as frauds. http://www.nraila.org/Issues/Articles/Read.aspx?id=317&issue=010

This is a direct quote from the Department of Justice report that you've repeatedly cited in this thread:

"The NSPOF does not provide much evidence on whether
consumers who buy guns for protection against crime
get their money's worth. The NSPOF-based estimate
of millions of DGUs each year greatly exaggerates
the true number, as do other estimates based on
similar surveys."

As for your other link, Cook, Ludwig and Hemenway aren't the only ones who reached the conclusion that DGU numbers are greatly exaggerated; we can go back and forth with endless links. My point was that, like climate science, gun statistics have become so heavily politicized that it's almost impossible to distinguish objective and reasonably accurate social science from stuff that is ideologically driven.