Newsgroups: talk.politics.guns
From: [ACUS 05] at [WACCVM.SPS.MOT.COM] (Paul Anderson)
Subject: Kopel - Why good people own guns
Date: Tue, 7 Dec 1993 18:43:46 GMT

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From the Phoenix Gazette, b-17
Dec. 3, 1993
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                     Why good people own guns
  Self-protection is job for individual; government can't do it


By Dave Kopel
(Kopel is research director of the Independence Institute in Denver.)


        Early one Sunday morning in November, factory worker
Arthur Boone was walking home in Brooklyn after shopping in a
neighborhood _bodega_. Carl James, age 15, allegedly came up to
Boone, stuck a gun to his head and ordered, "Give it up," while
19-year-old Taz Pell began searching through Boone's pockets.

        So far, a typical Sunday morning in New York. Then Boone
pulled out his .44 magnum and shot both robbers dead.

        Each of the assailants had police records; one had been
arrested for robbery just two weeks earlier. The 41-year-old
Boone, who had been mugged twice before and pistol-whipped so
severely that he required hospitalization, was promptly arrested
on weapons charges.

        A few days before, in Chicago, a 16-year-old with a
burglary record broke into the home of Bessie Jones, a
92-year-old widow confined to a wheelchair. She was wheeled
around and ordered to point out everything of value. When the
burglar stepped outside for a moment to confer with his lookout,
Jones reached under a blanket, pulled out a .38 Colt revolver and
killed him. Although possession of the revolver was clearly in
violation of Chicago's handgun prohibition, the state's
attorney's office decided not to prosecute.

        As national gun control even stricter than the Chicago
and New York models is proposed, some attention is due to the
many millions of Americans who, like Arthur Boone and Bessie
Jones, possess firearms for protection.

        In all nations that have achieved popular compliance with
strict gun-control laws, there has always been one common
condition precedent: public safety. That is, before the gun laws
were enacted, the public already felt little need to have guns
for protection because there was little crime.

        Contrast the situation in, say, early 20th century
Britain with the late 20th century United States. Not only does
the U.S. government fail to provide effective protection; the
government insists it has no legal duty to do so. The courts have
concurred, holding that the police have no duty to protect anyone
and cannot be held liable, even in cases where the victim was
targeted in advance but was denied police protection.

        The American people are, for all practical purposes, left
to take care of themselves. If a criminal attacks, it is almost
certain that a police officer will not be there to help. Until
this fundamental reality changes, tens of millions of Americans
are going to hold onto their guns, no matter what.

        But isn't it a fact that guns kept for protection are
almost never used? Well, no. In a 1981 survey conducted by
pollster Peter A. Hart for the National Alliance Against
Violence, 4 percent of the households polled reported at least
one use of a handgun against a person in the previous five years.
Even if we assume only one incident per reporting household,
that's 645,000 defensive uses of handguns per year. Based on
these figures, about 18 percent of people who owned handguns for
protection actually used them for protection.

        Canadian criminologist Gary Mauser's research found
similar rates of protective uses by Canadian handgun owners,
despite Canadian laws allowing handgun possession only for sport.

        This year, Florida State University criminologist Gary
Kleck conducted a more in-depth survey. Detailed questioning
weeded out respondents who confused merely owning a gun for
protection with actually using it. The questions also accounted
for persons who had used a gun defensively more than once.

        Kleck's data show that guns of all types are used
defensively between 850,000 and 2.5 million times a year in the
United States. Most of the defensive uses involved handguns, and
the vast majority of such uses do not involve firing the weapon,
but merely brandishing it to scare away an attacker.

        The surveys of citizen use of guns for protection are
consistent with surveys of criminals. In a National Institute of
Justice study of incarcerated felons, 38 percent said that they
had decided not to commit a particular crime out of fear that the
victim might be armed.

        The United States has much more violent crime than other
industrial nations, yet, oddly, it has a lower rate of burglary
of occupied residences than do nations that prohibit gun
ownership for protection. The best explanation is that only in
the United States do burglars face a risk of getting shot that is
as large as their risk of getting arrested.

        As Florida law enforcement officials have noted, one of
the important reasons for foreign tourists being singled out for
robbery is that in Florida, licensed, trained citizens (including
American visitors) can obtain permits to carry a concealed
handgun for protection. But in New York City and Los Angeles (and
the rest of the country if the anti-gun lobby gets its way),
gun-control laws put everyone in the same position as the
tourists in Florida -- government-certified defenseless prey.

        A rational gun-control policy needs to focus on reducing
the crimes that inflict grievous harm while increasing the
citizens' ability to protect against such crimes. Most
gun-control proposals offer little prospect of reducing criminal
use but pose a substantial threat to lawful defensive use.

        The implicit theory of the gun-control movement -- that
most Americans are too incompetent or mentally unstable to use a
gun for defensive purposes -- simply is not borne out by the
facts. Learning how to shoot well is easier than learning how to
type.

        One problem -- perhaps the major problem -- in achieving
a rational debate on this issue is the news media, which tend to
broadcast uncritically any "expert findings" that support gun
control. Typical was the recent "news" that a study in the New
England Journal of Medicine had found that owning a gun increases
a person's risk of being murdered by 2.7 times. The author, a
prominent epidemiologist, had taken a set of homicide victims,
identified some of their socioeconomic and behavioral variables
and matched them to a control group of non-victims.

        The very same data that "proved" the risk of gun
ownership also "proved" that renting a home, rather than owning
it, increased the homicide risk by 4.4. Does this mean that when
your apartment goes co-op, and you own it instead of renting it,
your risk of being murdered falls dramatically?

        Of course not. Instead, renters might be more likely to
live in a rough neighborhood or unstable circumstances, which
puts them in a higher risk category. Similarly, people at risk of
being assaulted might simply be more likely to own guns than
people in safer circumstances. Getting rid of the gun might not
make the renter any safer than buying out the landlord.

        Most significantly, the study made no effort to
investigate the 99 percent of protective uses of guns that do not
involve a fatality. The folks who got murdered are, after all,
the folks for whom protection did not work. A study that ignores
survivors, the hundreds of thousands of people who use guns for
protection each year, can't say much about the overall protective
effect of gun ownership.

        Despite the limitations of the study, almost every news
report treated the 2.7 figure unquestionably, as a scientific
fact. Many academic criminologists thought the study was
worthless, but the only dissent reported was from a researcher
for the National Rifle Association.

        Other published factoids purporting to show the dangers
of gun ownership are similarly vacuous. If the media spent
one-tenth as much effort looking into the truth behind these
claims as they spend investigating the conflicting stories about
President Clinton's haircuts, the quality of the gun-control
debate would improve considerably.

        It's true that in some homes, such as those of
alcoholics, the mentally ill or ex-felons, the presence of a gun
does substantially increase the risk of a homicide. But here,
too, the "facts" can be twisted to the anti-gun lobby's favor:
The male felon killed by his girlfriend is counted as the victim
of a "tragic domestic homicide," not the perpetrator of vicious
abuse.

        But most households are not violence-prone; rather, most
gun owners' concern is about violence directed against them from
the outside. They know, intuitively, that the government will not
protect them from criminal attack. Arthur Boone and Bessie Jones
correctly understood this, and they have the support of the tens
of millions of other Americans who own guns for protection.

        (Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service.)