[EDITED to add: oops, I completely misinterpreted what Decius wrote. What follows is therefore approximately 100% irrelevant. I'll leave it there, though, because I don't believe in trying to erase one's errors from history :-). Also: I fixed a small typo.]
Assuming this isn't a statistical joke like the one about always taking a bomb with you when you fly (because it's very unlikely that there'll be two bombs on a single plane) ... do you have reason to think that having-but-deliberately-not-using the firearm actually causes this alleged improved safety?
It seems like there are some very obvious ways in in which that association could exist without the causal link -- e.g., people are more likely to be able to resist when the danger is less, people who are concerned enough about their safety to carry for that reason but sensible enough not to shoot are also more likely to take other measures that improve their safety, etc.
Who said anything about not using? I have never seen statistics regarding outcomes of victims of violent crime having a firearm but never drawing it.
There could be other confounding factors as well, like underreporting by people who are mugged, cooperate, and experience no injury; or a tendency among people who carry legally to know how to use their weapons better than criminals and typical people; or difficulty determining whether a dead victim resisted or not. But the statistics aren't even remotely vague: Among reported victims of violent crime, a large...
I heard that women are difficult to convince when it comes to signing up for cryo. In mentioning cryonics to a dying person, there seems to be a consensus that it's not going to happen. I encountered a post: Years saved: Cryonics vs VillageReach, which addressed my main objection (that the amount of money spent on cryo may be better spent on saving starving children, especially considering that you could save multiple children for that amount of money with high probability whereas you save only one life with low probability by paying for cryo). Now I'm open to being persuaded.
My first instinct was to go read a lot about cryo, but it dawned on me that there are a lot of people here who will want to convince family members, some of them female, to sign up - and these people may appreciate the opportunity to practice on somebody. It has been argued that "Brilliant and creative minds have explored the argument territory quite thoroughly." but if we already know all of the objections and have working rebuttals for each, why is it still thought of as extra difficult to get through to women? If there were a solution to this, it would not be seen as difficult. There must be something that pro-cryo people need for persuading women that they either haven't figured out or aren't good enough at yet.
So, I decided to offer myself for experiments in attempting to convince a woman to sign up for cryo and took a poll in an open thread to see whether there was interest. I don't claim to be perfectly representative of the female population, but I assume that I will have at least some objections in common with them and that persuading me would still be good practice for anyone planning to convince family members in the future. Having a study on persuading women would be more scientific but how do you come up with hypotheses to test for such a study if you have no actual experience persuading women?
So, here is your opportunity to try whatever methods of persuasion you feel like with no guilt, explore my full list of objections without worrying about it being socially awkward, (I will even share cached religious thoughts, as annoyed as I am that I still have them.), and I will document as many of my impressions and objections as I can before I forget them.
I am putting each objection / impression into a new comment for organization. Also, I have decided to avoid reading anything further on cryo, until/unless it is suggested by one of my persuaders.
Well, have fun getting inside my head.