In the gun lobby’s arsenal of propaganda, the claim that guns make people safer may be the most potent.
After all, while gun advocates make grandiose—and historically inaccurate (Consortium News, 12/21/12)—claims about the Second Amendment being designed to enable armed citizens to resist government tyranny, no sane person believes individuals armed with handguns and rifles would stand a chance against a trillion-dollar 21st century military backed by vast surveillance systems.
But protecting one’s family, home or person? That seems sensible enough. If guns make us safer, as they say, then having a gun for self-defense isn’t an irrational choice.
The premise is regularly featured in news reports. This Week host George Stephanopoulos (ABC, 1/20/13) offered no challenge when former Republican Sen. Rick Santorum claimed, “There are more people who protect themselves and stop violence …happen[ing] to them with the ownership of a gun than [there are] people who commit crimes with a gun.”
Fox News, of course, where gun ownership is practically a sacrament, has featured a virtual rhumba line of pro-gun guests touting the virtues of safety by gun. Hannity’s January 18 show might as well have been renamed the NRA Hour, featuring first NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre stating that the vast majority of the American public “deeply believes in the Second Amendment, deeply believes they have a right to protect themselves”—followed by former Rep. Asa Hutchinson, director of the NRA’s National School Shield Project, who told gun-toting host Sean Hannity that the solution to school shootings was “to have the armed, trained presence there to really protect the children.”
It’s not just conservatives and Fox pundits who embrace the self-defense argument. Discussing gun regulations on CBS’s Face the Nation (12/16/12), anchor Bob Schieffer endorsed the view that protection was a legitimate rationale for gun ownership: “By now, the pros and cons of the gun issue are well known…. Of course, there are legitimate reasons for both pleasure and protection to own guns.”
On January 9, CNN’s Anderson Cooper presented a segment that gave more or less equal weight to arguments for and against the notion that guns make us safer, concluding that it’s hard to say for sure:
The one true thing that we know about the gun debate here at home, that neither side has a monopoly on the truth, or even the facts, because the facts can be so hard to establish. One side has studies linking gun ownership with violent death. But correlation is not causation.
The other side has research showing when people are allowed to carry concealed weapons, violent crimes slow down. Yet newer studies cast doubt on that conclusion.
Studying the problem is hard, said Cooper, “with a shortage of facts but a surplus of victims and anguish and loss, the debate so far has evolved into passionately stated and exclusively competing articles of faith.”
But is it really hard to study the effects of guns on public health and safety? And is the debate merely between competing articles of faith? Perhaps more to the point, does the evidence support Schieffer’s and the others’ claims that guns are a rational choice for self-defense?
The pro-gun crowd sure wants you to think so, promoting studies over the years claiming guns are used defensively thousands of times per day and that broader gun ownership makes communities safer, and repeating anecdotes in which guns are reported to have thwarted crimes.
A favorite study of these advocates is 1995’s “Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense With a Gun” (Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Fall/95), by Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz, which found that guns were used defensively about 2.5 million times annually in the U.S.—or almost 7,000 times a day.
Researcher John Lott conducted another study favored by gun advocates, published in his 1998 book More Guns, Less Crime, which claimed that increasing numbers of concealed carry permits in a given area are associated with decreasing crime rates.
Both studies have been convincingly challenged in the scientific community. In a 2004 meta-study of gun research, the National Research Council of the National Academies of Science found that Lott’s claims were not supported by his data. And when Lott misrepresented the report (New York Post, 12/29/04), the NAS published a letter (Deltoid, 1/26/05) listing his distor-tions. Shooting Down the More Guns Less Crime Hypothesis (11/02), a paper pub-lished by the National Bureau of Economic Research, found crime actually increased in states and locales where concealed carry laws had been adopted.
The Harvard School of Public Health’s David Hemenway took on Kleck in Survey Research and Self Defense Gun Use: An Explanation of Extreme Overestimates (Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 1997), demonstrating that because of the nature of the data, Kleck’s self-reported phone survey finding 2.5 million defensive uses of guns per year was wildly exaggerated. For example, Kleck says guns were used to defend against 845,000 burglaries in 1992, a year in which the National Crime Victimization Survey says there were fewer than 6 million burglaries.
Hemenway put together facts from the well-regarded NCVS—that someone was known to be home in just 22 percent of burglaries (1.3 million), and that fewer than half of U.S. households have firearms—and pointed out that Kleck “asks us to believe that burglary victims in gun-owning households use their guns in self-defense more than 100 percent of the time.”
Hemenway noted that respondents may also have a distorted view of “self-defense”—e.g., mistakenly thinking they are legally defending themselves when they draw a gun during a minor altercation. As the Harvard researcher and his co-authors in another study pointed out (Injury Prevention, 12/00): “Guns are used to threaten and intimidate far more often than they are used in self-defense. Most self-reported self-defense gun uses may well be illegal and against the interests of society.”
A National Crime Victimization Survey report, controlling for many of the methodological problems in Kleck, supported Hemenway, finding 65,000 defensive gun uses per year (NCVS Report, 1997). Current NCVS estimates are in the 100,000 range.
To assess the benefits and costs of pervasive gun ownership—there are currently 300 million firearms in the U.S., and roughly 80 million gun owners (CNSNews.com, 2/4/13)—it’s useful to compare the self-defense numbers to the gun crime numbers. The National Institute of Justice reported that in 2005, “11,346 persons were killed by firearm violence and 477,040 persons were victims of a crime committed with a firearm.” Or, to put it in starker terms, the FBI’s Crime in the United States report for 1998 found that for every instance that a civilian used a handgun to kill in self-defense, 50 people lost their lives in handgun homicides.
With a gun murder rate about 20 times the average of other industrialized countries (Washington Post, 12/14/12), it’s hard to argue with Hemenway’s conclusion (Harvard Injury Control Research Center, “Homicide”): “Where there are more guns, there is more homicide.”
A New England Journal of Medicine study (10/7/93) in 1993 concluded that a gun in the home raised the chances someone in a family will be killed by nearly three times, with the danger to women—who are more likely to be killed by a spouse, intimate or relative—even greater. A 1997 study in the Archives of Internal Medicine (4/14/97) reinforces that danger, finding that the homicide risk for women increased 3.4 times in a home with one or more guns. Taken together with the heightened risk of suicide and accidental deaths posed by guns in the home, these numbers demolish the argument that guns enhance family protection.
Much of the research on guns and public health dates back to the 1990s, it should be noted, because of the near total ban that Congress imposed on public funding for studies of guns and public health in 1996, singling out the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). “Scientific inquiry in this field has been systematically starved, and as a result almost no one does it,” University of California–Davis professor Garen Winte-mute told Huffington Post (1/10/13). The ban was driven by the NRA, whose anti-inquiry view is shared by gun researcher Lott; when conservative talkshow host Mark Levin (WABC, 1/16/13) asked Lott whether he wanted “the Centers for Disease Control to be delving into studying the gun issue,” Lott responded, “No, no, I don’t.”
In addition to underplaying the statistical case that guns are a destructive force in society, the media have largely ignored experts who can explain the practical reasons why guns are not necessarily a rational choice for self-defense. An exception was 20/20’s report, “If I Only Had a Gun” (ABC, 4/10/09), which explored the issue with firearms experts.
20/20 took a group of college students of varying familiarity with guns, and provided them with professional training exceeding the level required by most states for concealed carry permits. Then the producers recorded the students reacting to simulations in which an aggressive, active gunman entered a classroom. In every simulation, the student failed to stop the aggressor and was badly or fatally wounded; in one instance, the student narrowly missed shooting a victim of the assault.
According to the weapons experts 20/20 consulted, only professionals who drill continuously in live shooter situations can hope to succeed in such chaotic situations. Firearms instructor Glen Dorney told host Diane Sawyer, “Even police officers, through extensive training, if you don’t continue with your training, ongoing training, it’s a perishable skill. You’ll lose it.” When Sawyer asked him, “How long before you’re going to lose it, even at your level of training?” Dorney answered, “If you go for a month to two months without training, you lose it.” A Time feature (1/16/13) that looked at how unpredictably even well-trained police respond to crisis situations came to similar conclusions.
The debate over the wisdom of wholesale arming of citizens for the purpose of self-defense is not a debate between two sides arguing “articles of faith,” and there is no shortage of facts. The verdict has been in for years: Guns, as they are bought and sold and regulated in U.S. society, do far more harm than good. And if we had a media culture where public health actually mattered in discussions of guns, the argument that they are helpful for protection or self-defense would be relegated to the margins.
What about Vermont? There is very little limits on firearms there, it’s where you don’t need a license to open or concealed carry a weapon and 16 year olds can buy assault weapons, yet they have the lowest murder rate in the country, or second lowest next to Maine, one of those two :P
@ Xanti, since you are a fan of statistics, Hawaii has the lowest murder rate of the 50 states. Next is a three-way tie among Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Vermont. Here’s another statistic: It took me three minutes to find that information on the web.
Death by firearms, of course, correlates to population density, which somehow you haven’t mentioned. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Vermont ranks 31st of the 50 states in population density, with 67.73 inhabitants per square mile in 2011.
Most firearm deaths occur in crowded urban areas, and in a Census Bureau ranking of communities with more than 10,000 people per square mile, Vermont is 31st. The state’s largest urban area is someplace called Winooski, which has a mere 4,586 people per square mile.
If you google “world population” and click on the first entry, you will see a Wikipedia page with population projections for countries, continents and planet earth going out to 2025. Compare those exponential growth projections with the statistics on gun deaths by population density, and you will see that the United States will have to outlaw guns in private hands before much longer, despite the NRA’s current control of the U.S. Congress and the media.
The argument against Klecks numbers is bad science as it looks at two different reporting methods, phone surveys vs.FBI stats. You can’t compare them and use the reason to argue that one is wrong because the numbers don’t jive because they use two entirely different methodologies.
The FBI and police experts all agree that well over half of all burglaries and assaults go unreported. Thus FBI stats are known to under-report actual crimes. Scientists confirm this through the National Crime Victimization Survey through the Bureau of Justice Statics, part of the Department of Justice.
According to the DoJ, household thefts go unreported 67% of the time.
Thus arguing that Klecks numbers are bad because his number is larger than the FBI number is just junk science. The only way to test is for another scientist to go out and conduct the same phone surveys as Kleck. So far no one has been willing to do that.
Are guns used to defend life and property every day in the U.S. Yes they are. To see recent stories visit http://www.twitter.com/2ndRight
As far as Citizens standing up to their government, abuse is far more likely at the local level rather than Federal. Look up the Battle of Athens for more recent history, this one the 20th Century. Or the LA Riots where business and homeowners defended life and property most of the time without ever firing a shot.
The right of self defense is a long supported tenant of common law. It is a right guaranteed by the Second Amendment and many states also guarantee that right in their state constitutions.
The issue isn’t gun legal ownership, it is illegal guns and criminals committing crimes with guns. Legislating guns because they have a pistol grip or a 15 round magazine or look like military-only arms does nothing to solve violent crime. The DOJ funded study completed in 2004 showed the Clinton Assault weapons ban did nothing to reduce violent crime.
Universal background checks only means legal gun owners get background checks. It does nothing to solve or reduce crime. Criminals don’t buy guns from Gun Shows or Gun dealers. Less than 1% of all gun crimes came from a gun purchased or acquired legally.
If legislating and banning guns won’t lower violent crime, what will?
I contend that Universal healthcare including mental healthcare will reduce violent crimes.
Every mass killer in the last 10 years had known mental health problems. Problems known by extended family members, healthcare professionals, teachers and school administrators. The problem was and still is, no one could or would do anything about it and those problems festered until they exploded in a tragic event where people were killed or injured.
Hawaii has the lowest murder rate, Hawaii also has universal healthcare including mental health services.
I love it when anti-gun types argue about one state or country having lower crime saying it is because they ban guns. Not true. If that was the case California, Chicago and D.C. would have significantly lower violent crime because they ban and limit gun ownership.
However, what is true is any state or country that does have lower violent crime rates also has universal healthcare and mental care.
I am a card-carrying Democrat, a gun owner, I voted for Obama twice and support Obamacare.
I believe the solution to making significant reductions in all forms of violence is universal healthcare, not universal background checks and piling more laws on to already law-abiding citizens.
“…no sane person believes individuals armed with handguns and rifles would stand a chance against a trillion-dollar 21st century military backed by vast surveillance systems.”
Hmm, I guess that’s why the US has done so well and worked so quickly in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Apples and oranges.
A domestic attempt to overthrow a government is not the same as a foreign power trying to conquer and pacify a country that doesn’t want to be pacified. In cases like Afghanistan and Vietnam, the war just goes on and on until the foreign power decides its not worth it any more. Meanwhile, the infrastructure of the country gets destroyed and millions of lives are shattered. Nobody really wins.
That’s not the case with this mythical revolution that gun-nuts look forward to. Stopping the overthrow of the US government would be very easy for our modern military. It might get bloody and nasty, but it would not succeed. Besides, why would anyone want that? Giving the government a monopoly on violence works pretty well.
The threat of citizens revolting with small arms is not what is keeping us free. What is keeping us free, insofar as we are, are things like checks and balances, an independent judiciary, elections, our vast wealth, and the global integration of the economy such that its not really in any other country’s interest to attack us. Besides, in any reasonable measure of “freedom” EXCEPT for gun ownership, the US is not in first place. Countries that have strict bans on guns are just as “free” if not moreso than us and they aren’t living in constant fear of getting shot.
Reluctantly, I have been prepared to accept that some persons – with a proven need for self-protection, a thorough background check, and rigorous training – should be able to defend their homes with firearms, while concomitantly every effort by the society was made to obviate that need.
But in light of the study showcased on “20/20”, I have to reevaluate that view.
The odds of successfully defending oneself or others with a gun, versus the astronomically greater odds of tragedy occurring, has to lead any rational person to question whether there is any place for one, even under the most stringent conditions.
We have a right to protect ourselves and others
But that right isn’t absolute as to the methods we may employ.
I still can’t say definitively that no one under any circumstances should own a gun for self defense
But that would be with the proviso that it be the very definition of a last resort.
(The subject of “pleasure”, including the slaughter of other species, will have to wait for another day.)
(Apologies. I neglected to check the box for notification of follow ups.)
2ndright, it’s true that you can find an “expert” to attest to just about anything, but several were consulted for the 20/20 piece, and when it comes to such matters, I try to divine what they have to gain by making such assertions.
In this case, it would appear their self interest would lie in promoting firearms training as effective and worth the investment.
They don’t, which leads me to think that they’re simply relating their empirical experience. If you have evidence to the contrary, other experts who disagree, please provide that.
Of course, as just stated, they may have an vested interest in making their counter claims.
As regards the NCVS, both Rendall and you use its findings to support your varying conclusions. Can you post links to the original data you cite, so that we can evaluate it for ourselves?
As the song goes
Two men say they’re Jesus
One of them must be wrong
And I’ve been reading newspapers for closing in on half a century, from the Clarion Ledger in Jackson, MS to the Commercial Appeal in Memphis to the Wisconsin State Journal out of Madison to the San Francisco Chronicle and Oakland Tribune.
Over those decades, I couldn’t estimate how many items dealt with incidents of burglaries or violent crimes that are germane to the conversation there. It’s what the term “countless” was created for.
Yet I haven’t seen more than a handful (possibly missing a few digits) that related a successful defense using a weapon.
You might be right that many such crmes aren’t reported, but wouldn’t logic dictate that of those that are, and subsequently recounted in the media, a healthy percentage would cite such outcomes?
Where are you witnessing these reports?
I also would think that the NRA would be trotting out these folks at the drop of a hat, as it would be a salient reinforcement of their arguments
That isn’t the reality, is it?
So I’m trying to put two and two together here
And as yet, I can’t say you’ve shown me a four.
But I won’t close the books until you’ve had an opportunity to square the accounts.
One last item that doesn’t appear to add up
If the Second Amendment deals with the individual right to armed defense
Why wouldn’t it read something along the lines of
“An effective defense of life and property being necessary to the security of the individual and his home
(And in that time, “his” would have been the exclusionary adjective employed)
The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” ?
Now, I’m not an “expert”
But the whole “well regulated militia” thing doesn’t seem to jibe with that interpretation.
Again, I’m not picking up foursies here.
Doug,
1. Data is from the National Crime Victimization Survey
http://bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=dcdetail&iid=245
2. New Media reports about Self Defense and Guns can be found here
https://twitter.com/2ndright
3. The NRA has been publishing stories about self defense for over 40 years in an on-going column called the Armed Citizen.
http://www.americanrifleman.org/BlogList.aspx?cid=25&id=21
and more info can be found here including 4100 media stories from 2003 to 2009
http://www.nrapublications.org/index.php/9493/who-is-the-armed-citizen/
As you can see, 4,100 stories is far more than just a handful of stories in the media.
Finally a good source of facts and original source data can be found here. http://www.justfacts.com/guncontrol.asp
Empirical: Based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience rather than theory or pure logic.
Observation, the over 1,000 stories reported each year in the news media about self-defense with a gun. http://www.twitter.com/2ndRight
Research: Measuring Civilian Defensive Firearm Use: A Methodological Experiment Journal of Quantitative Criminology
March 2000, Volume 16, Issue 1, pp 1-19 http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023%2FA%3A1007588410221
Report from the Dept of Justice – Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) Defensive Gun Use 1994 indicated 82,000 annual defensive gun use (DGU)
http://bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=946
Say what? “… grandiose and historically inaccurate”??? Hahahaha.
Let me digress a bit here first. Steve Rendall, it appears your sources were selected via a combination of deliberate bias and confirmation bias.
While it is true that Lott has been criticized, that criticism has also been overblown. I have read the NRC’s “rebuttal” to Lott’s criticism as well. They spend a lot of words to say next to nothing. It amounts to a statement that research regarding whether carry laws increase or reduce crime are inconclusive. But they miss the much larger point that it is irrelevant whether there cause-and-effect. More on that in a moment. But where Lott’s own research has been criticized, he has vindicated himself. Example: he was unable to produce the raw data from one of his studies, claiming that a hard drive failure caused its loss. (Hey… I am a computer professional and despite backups, I have lost data before that way too.) But he was raked over the coals, and accusations were made that the paper was “faked”. His response? He performed the entire study over again, and published the results WITH his raw data. Yet people are still trying to accuse him of “faking” it. What a load of BS.
But back to the subject I was discussing: whether there is cause and effect in regard to the carry laws as NRC stated is really not that important. There *IS* a well-known and consistent correlation, even if no cause and effect. See my other comments here. Big picture, we know from DOJ and BCS stats, without much wiggle room, that: (A) per-capita crime today is half what it was 20 years ago. Including firearms crimes. Including shootings. And despite what you read in the papers, mass shootings and even school shootings are down from what they were before.
Yet, in the same period, per-capita gun ownership has gone steadily up, and per-capita carry permits are completely off the charts, compared to 20 years ago. See the map I linked to in another comment.
Those numbers are from your own government. If you are inclined you can go to the DOJ and BCS websites and look them up yourselves. And while they don’t prove anything (because statistics can’t prove), they can and do clearly DISPROVE the notion that more guns means more crime. Because we HAVE more guns, yet we have less crime.
But now back to my original point: “Historically inaccurate”? Apparently, Steve, you are ignorant of the Supreme Court decision that stated the right to bear arms specifically refers to military-style arms. And also of the actual history and spirit of our Constitution.
Here are some “historical” quotes from our founding fathers. These are just off the cuff. I can find hundreds more. I just happened to have these at hand.
“Laws that forbid the carrying of arms…disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed one.” — from “Essay on Crimes and Punishments” by Cesare Beccaria, as quoted by Thomas Jefferson in his own “Legal Commonplace Book”
“The constitutions of most of our States assert that all power is inherent in the people; that… it is their right and duty to be at all times armed.” –Thomas Jefferson, letter to J. Cartwright, 1824.
“The Greeks by their laws, and the Romans by the spirit of their people, took care to put into the hands of their rulers no such engine of oppression as a standing army. Their system was to make every man a soldier and oblige him to repair to the standard of his country whenever that was reared. This made them invincible; and the same remedy will make us so.” –Thomas Jefferson, letter to T. Cooper, 1814
“Mr. Chairman — A worthy member has asked, who are the militia, if they be not the people, of this country, and if we are not to be protected from the fate of the Germans, Prussians, &c. by our representation? I ask who are the militia? They consist now of the whole people, except a few public officers. But I cannot say who will be the militia of the future day. If that paper on the table gets no alteration, the militia of the future day may not consist of all classes, high and low, and rich and poor; but may be confined to the lower and middle classes of the people, granting exclusion to the higher classes of the people. If we should ever see that day, the most ignominious punishments and heavy fines may be expected. Under the present government all ranks of people are subject to militia duty.” — George Mason, at the Virginia Ratifying Convention, June 14, 1788.
“Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom in Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops that can be, on any pretence, raised in the United States. A military force, at the command of Congress, can execute no laws, but such as the people perceive to be just and constitutional; for they will possess the power, and jealousy will instantly inspire the inclination, to resist the execution of a law which appears to them unjust and oppressive.” — Noah Webster, An Examination of the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution (Philadelphia 1787)
Washington Post Fact Checker gives Obama claim on Gun Background checks Two Pinocchios.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/update-obama-claim-on-background-checks-moved-from-verdict-pending-to-2-pinocchios/2013/01/25/59caeca6-672f-11e2-85f5-a8a9228e55e7_blog.html
Here is what the President said.
“The law already requires licensed gun dealers to run background checks, and over the last 14 years that’s kept 1.5 million of the wrong people from getting their hands on a gun. But it’s hard to enforce that law when as many as 40 percent of all gun purchases are conducted without a background check.”
— President Obama, remarks on gun violence, Jan. 16, 2013
“Studies estimate that nearly 40 percent of all gun sales are made by private sellers who are exempt from this requirement.”
— “Now Is the Time: The president’s plan to protect our children and our communities by reducing gun violence,” released Jan. 16
And WaPo’s response:
(R)ather than being 30 to 40 percent (the original estimate of the range) or “up to 40 percent” (Obama’s words), gun purchases without background checks amounted to 14 to 22 percent. And since the survey sample is so small, that means the results have a survey caveat: plus or minus six percentage points.
Dang the Science of Statistics and those pesky fact checkers at the Washington Post.
Doug,
Your argument was the use of guns for self defense is a rare occurrence and happens a handful or maybe a couple dozen times per year. The data shows self defense use of guns happens hundreds of times every day.
Moreover, the right to bear arms is a right guaranteed in the US Constitution and 43 State Constitutions. It is a right just like free speech and unreasonable search and seizure.
Guns are one of the most regulated goods sold in the US. The current new round of regulations seek to ban guns for how the look and not for how they function. Banning guns based solely on their color or because one model has a pistol grip is not reasonable regulations.
The Second Amendment still covers modern guns for the same reason the First Amendment covers the Internet and blogs.
PD: Two Dead After Shooting At Maypearl Home
http://dfw.cbslocal.com/2013/03/20/pd-two-dead-after-shooting-at-maypearl-home/
Yet there is one things authorities all agree on. “This is a perfect example of how, if the homeowner had not been armed,” Ellis County (TX) Sheriff Johnny Brown told reporters, “this incident could have very well had a different, tragic outcome involving our residents.”
A spokesperson for the department, Lt. Saulter said, the incident is an example of why the sheriff encourages citizens to arm themselves.
In the roughly 15 minutes it took deputies to respond to the home, he said, the couple was left to fend for themselves.
“This would have been a totally different outcome, I believe, had the homeowners not been armed,” he said.
——– end of story ——–
The FAIR author Steve Rendall claims “Owning guns doesn’t actually help stop gun violence”
Tell that to this family in Texas lucky to be alive tonight because they had guns to defend themselves.
There have been over 100 reported stories of self defense with guns reported in the media across the United States since this article was first written some three weeks ago. Not one case where the homeowners gun was used against them and in fact in one case, an unarmed homeowner was able to wrestle the gun away from the bad guy and then use the gun to defend himself.
Sadly, but not unexpectedly, no one at FAIR will acknowledge these stories or the data. Not exactly, what would you call it, fair.
Relevant intel:
Violence Policy Center
As Zimmerman Case Begins, VPC Research Details Hundreds of Examples of Innocent Lives Lost to “Concealed Carry Killers”
http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2013/06/27-3
Obama orders CDC gun violence study in December 2012, report released in June 2013 doesn’t support his position on guns.
Oh dang it, there are those pesky facts getting in the way of a perfectly good argument.
The study conducted by Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council, found guns were overwhelmingly used for defense over 500,000 times per year.
That guns owners were safer and with far fewer injuries than victims of crimes that did not have guns.
As Robert Laurie observed:
Earlier this year, President Obama signed a set of executive orders targeting gun violence in the wake of the Sandy Hook shootings. Among them was an edict commanding the CDC to do a comprehensive survey of studies regarding guns and gun violence in the United States. Clearly, once the CDC produced the hard evidence that the US was a violent nation of wild-west shootouts, the American people would be eager to approve and fund future research while embracing strict gun control legislation.
At least that was the plan. The study, which was compiled by the Institute of Medicine and National Research Council under the CDC’s direction, was recently completed and released. The anti-gun crowd has been awfully quiet about it. Could it be that it didn’t support their bogus hypothesis?
In a word, Yes. The CDC’s numbers basically back every pro-gun rights argument made over the course of the last year.
Read the study for yourself, you can buy a copy for $39 or read it on-line
Priorities for Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-related Violence
http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=18319&page=
Non-Lethal or “Less Than Lethal” weapons are all the latest rage. They have made vast improvements on these systems over the last ten years and a lot of this has to do with all the controversy surrounding shootings. If you have to defend your life by taking another persons life, YOUR life will be turned upside down. There is a really good online store that specializes in these types of non-lethal products http://www.VisaDefense.com
What amazed me beyond belief regarding this article is that all the attacks that are made on self defense studies are done by extremely liberal journalists. Gary Kleck is a liberal democrat, but his study supported the fact that armed citizens had a major effect on reducing crime. The same can be said for the study conducted by Dr. John Lott as well.
Now, when an article makes sarcastic remarks against corporations such as Fox News, but then praises CNN’s Anderson Cooper’s hard work on the subject. I have to challenge the validity of what the author says due to his obvious bias. Another liberal reporter, Dick Gregory violated the DC’s magazine ban on television. However, he was not charged because he is a “friend” of the liberal media. How dare we would ever think of charging him when he violated the law in front of millions of Americans. It is blatantly obvious when you read this article that it has a very leftist slant to it. The facts are the facts my friends. In America, the police have no duty to protect you as an individual, only society as a whole. This was decided by the Supreme Court in Warren vs. the United States and Riss vs. New York. There are also some other interesting cases out there on this subject matter as well. So, before you sit back and think that someone is coming to help you in your hour of need. In reality, that may not be the case at all, and the only person you may rely on to protect yourself and your family is you. Maybe the wealthy liberals who live in their gated communities with 24/7 security don’t have to be concerned with their safety like the rest of us. However, I take the safety and security of my family very seriously. In the end, there are two types of people in thus world. Those who can, and those who cannot; the only question is which type will you choose to be in the end. I choose to be responsible for my family’s safety and to protect them to the best of my ability.
LOL… gun owners can’t stand up to “a trillion dollar 21’st century military.” Take a good look at Afghanistan, where the U.S. military has been fighting a lesser equipped band of insurgents for 14 years, and STILL can’t claim victory. Compared to all Americans, the military is a minority. And there’s a contradiction among gun control “experts” over how dangerous guns are. Privately owned firearms are constantly portrayed as the greatest threat to the public. yet, when it comes to standing against the military, they are portrayed as insignificant. So which is it… either guns are incredibly dangerous or they are very weak. They can’t be both! Never forget that the second amendment is our right to defend our homes against criminals and our freedom against tyranny.
VPC… now there’s a fact based and unbiased organization.
When I was 14 I had a lady knock on our door, did not let her in. Minutes later loud banging trying to get in. I gathered my 8 year old sister and 12 year old twins then grabbed my father’s gun and shot a man. Saved 4 lives that night. WITH A GUN, so you can go to hell with the scumbag that I killed while 4 lives keep living. The twins graduate next year. The youngest will be into high school. My story was in a lot of papers and media. So there isn’t one damn thing any of you take the guns away idiots can say to me!
When we looked in Maryland we found that virtually all, 280 of 300 cases, the gun owner was a criminal with an illegal gun. Applying that to the data set the results invert and gun owning homes of non criminals are about 25% safer than unarmed homes.
This is not a small point since the Harvard Injury and NEJ studies cited use a methodology which if applied to visits to hosptial would show that going to the hospital increases risk of death by a factor of 1,400% or more.
The fact is that the data set is not random in either case (gun ownership deaths or hospitalization deaths). A small specific ultra high risk group subset, unrepresentative of the rest of the data set, are over 90% of deaths in both cases. If you control out those with fatal disease or injury in the case of hospitalizations, or control out prior criminals in the case of home gun killing the results invert.
I am surprised FAIR does not recognize this
Really? Small arms have no chance of standing up against the military might of the USA….. Have you been paying attention to the world lately? Are you familiar with Vietnam, Afganastan,….? This artical is a joke and propaganda!
The question is easy to answer. 13000 people die each day from smoking. 30 from guns. Is it the loud noise that scares you? Why does a liberal or communist want your gun so Bad?
Actually, smoking kills 1,300 people a day, guns kill 92, according to the CDC. People who die from guns tend to be younger, however, and smokers are more likely to kill themselves rather than someone else.