Defensive carrying has more benefits than risks.
The quote you gave dispels the argument that murders are often committed with the victim's own weapons. It does not address the claim you are making by any means.
Ooops, that was about the home thing.
This is about general carrying:
title of article: Carrying guns for protection: results from the National Self-Defense Survey
Consistent with this hypothesis, Kleck and Patterson (1993:269) found that cities with higher gun prevalence (and presumably higher gun-carrying rates) had lower rates of robbery, a crime typically committed in public places. This association was not significant for total and gun robberies but was significant for nongun robberies. This fits closely with the expectation that robbers lacking guns themselves would be the ones most likely to be deterred by the prospect of victims with guns. Deterring these robbers is especially important in fight of the fact that prior research has consistently indicated that unarmed robbers are more likely to injure victims than are armed robbers
Basically, unarmed robbers are more likely to hurt you and unarmed robbers are deterred by gun carrying citizens
Likewise, in a comprehensive pooled cross-sections time series analysis of virtually all 3,141 U.S. counties, Lott and Mustard (1997) found that robbery rates, as well as homicide (both with and without guns), rape, and aggravated assaults, declined after states passed laws making it easier for noncriminals to obtain carry permits. They interpreted the results as indicating that allowing more citizens to legally carry guns reduced rates of crimes involving direct offender-victim contact by raising robbers' perception of risk from armed victims. Although it is debatable how much of this pattern reflected causal effects of new laws (Kleck 1997, chap. 6), the results strongly undercut the conclusions of McDowall, Loftin, and Wiersema (1995), based on univariate (or bivariate) analyses of homicide trends in just seven nonrandomly selected counties (clustered into five areas), that such laws increase gun homicides, supposedly because they indirectly stimulate offender gun carrying (see Britt, Kleck, and Bordua 1996 for a critique of interrupted time series evaluations of legal interventions).
While allowing gun possession doesnt necessitate decrease in crime, there is a strong correlation.
It is a mistake to think of gun carrying as something done largely for criminal purposes, except in the definitional sense that most concealed carrying without a permit is itself a crime. As will be documented, most nonrecreational carrying is done for noncriminal purposes of self-defense. Self-defense gun carrying is worth taking seriously for two reasons. First, the empirical literature is unanimous in portraying defensive gun use as effective, in the sense that gun-wielding victim are less likely to be injured, lose property, or otherwise have crimes completed against them than victims who either do nothing to resist or who resist without weapons (for reviews, see Kleck 1997, chap. 5; Kleck and DeLone 1993).
Second, the literature is nearly unanimous (with a single dissenting source of survey information) in indicating that defensive gun use (DGU) is commonplace, though largely invisible to governments.(1) At least 15 surveys have yielded results implying anywhere from 760,000 to 3.6 million DGUs per year, with evidence from the first survey specifically designed to estimate DGU frequency, the National Self-Defense Survey (NSDS), indicating about 2.5 million instances of DGU per year (Kleck and Gertz 1995; for a recent confirming estimate, see Cook and Ludwig 1997:61-3).(2)
Over all? Carrying has far more benefits than risks.
